# Hierarchical models

## A modelling framework for estimation of benefit using single arm clinical trials

With [Anthony Hatswell](http://deltahat.co.uk/) and [Nick Freemantle](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cctu/meet-the-team/people/nickfreemantle)

## Incidence, prevalence and burden of the disease of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS)

With Christina Ding, [Irene Petersen](https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=IPETE57) and [Paul Hardiman](https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=PHARD26)

## New year resolution

Now that the Christmas break is just a distant memory (Marta would say that I am quite happy with that $-$ she thinks I’m like the Grinch around the Christmas holiday. And she is right), I’ve given way to my new year’s resolution of finally, properly packaging our two R packages that aren’t on CRAN yet. The first one is SWSamp (about which I’ve already talked here and here) and the second is survHE (which I have also already mentioned here and here).

## PhD opportunity!

Applications are invited for a PhD funding opportunity to conduct research in a branch of probability or statistics based in the UCL Department of Statistical Science, commencing in September 2017. This funding is provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The requirement for admission to the MPhil/PhD in Statistical Science is a 1st class or high upper 2nd class Bachelor’s degree, or a Master’s degree with merit or distinction, in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative discipline.

## 'Summer School: Bayesian Methods in Health Economics'

We’re finally ready to advertise our new Summer School on Bayesian Methods in Health Economics, in Florence, 12-16 June 2017! This is basically combining the two short courses that we’ve run in the past few years $-$ the first one on Bayesian modelling for cost-effectiveness analysis using R, BUGS and BCEA, which I have done with Chris and Richard; the second one is the short course on Value of Information we did last summer with Mark, Nicky and Anna.

## Shiny happy people in the land of the Czar

During the summer, we’ve worked silently but relentlessly to set up a departmental server that could run R-Shiny applications. There’s a bunch of us in the department doing work on R and producing packages and so we thought it’d be a good idea to disseminate our research. Which is just as well, as I’ve been nominated “2020 REF Impact Czar”, meaning I’ll have to help collate all the evidence that our work does have an impact on the “real world”…

## LGM 2016

Yesterday I went to beautiful Bath for The Fifth Workshop on Bayesian Inference for Latent Gaussian Models with Applications and give a talk on our work on INLA-SPDE to compute the Expected Value of Partial Perfect Information. I couldn’t stay for the whole three days, which is a shame because yesterday was really interesting. In the morning, Mike Betancourt (I’m not sure the page I’m linking here is his “official” one, as he’s left UCL now) gave an excellent tutorial on Stan.

## The guide

Before and over the Christmas break, Christina and I have done some more work on our bmeta package, which I’ve already mentioned in another post, here $-$ well, to be fair, Christina has done most of the work; I was being annoying suggesting changes to the maths formatting and thinking about potential new plots or additions just one second after she’d finished coding up the previous batch… Anyway, one of the things we felt was missing, was a detailed guide to the package $-$ and so we wrote one.

## Post mortem

This is again a guest post, mainly written by Roberto, which I only slightly edited (and if significantly so, I am making it clear by adding text in italics and in square brackets, like [this]). By the way, the pic on the left shows my favourite pathologist examining a post-mortem. A day after the bull-fight is over and done with (at least until the next election, which may be sooner than one would expect), we have to do some analysis as to what went right, and what failed, as it regards to our model.

## Political Forecasting Machine - The Spanish Edition

This is a (rather long, but I think equally interesting!) guest post by Roberto (he’s introducing himself below). We had already done some work on similar models a while back and he got so into this that now he wanted to actually take on the new version of Spanish Inquisition (aka general election). I’ll put my own comments on his original text below between square brackets (like [this]). My name is Roberto Cerina, I am a Masters student under Gianluca’s supervision here at UCL, and this is a guest post on work we’ve been doing together.