PhD Courses in Denmark

Bayesian Statistics Simulation and Software (2026)

Doctoral School of Engineering and Science at Aalborg University

During the last decades, Bayesian statistics has gained enormous popularity as an elegant and powerful computational tool to perform statistical analysis in complex stochastic models as applied in engineering, science and medicine. Bayesian statistics offers an alternative approach to traditional data analysis by including prior knowledge about the model parameters in form of a prior distribution. Using Bayes formula the prior distribution is updated from the posterior distribution by incorporating the observed data by means of the likelihood. Subsequently statistical inference about the unknown model parameters is derived from the posterior distribution. However, the posterior distribution is often intractable due to high-dimensional complex integrals implying that approximate stochastic simulation techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods become crucial. This course reviews the basics ideas behind Bayesian statistics and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Background on Markov chains will be provided and subjects such as Metropolis and Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, Gibbs sampling and output analysis will be discussed. Furthermore, graphical models will be introduced as a convenient tool to model complex dependency structures within a stochastic model.

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