automating approximate bayesian computation by local linear regression自动化近似贝叶斯算法的局部线性回归.pdfVIP

BMC Genetics BioMed Central Software Open Access Automating approximate Bayesian computation by local linear regression Kevin R Thornton Address: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA Email: Kevin R Thornton - krthornt@ Published: 7 July 2009 Received: 2 February 2009 Accepted: 7 July 2009 BMC Genetics 2009, 10:35 doi:10.1186/1471-2156-10-35 This article is available from: /1471-2156/10/35 © 2009 Thornton; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: In several biological contexts, parameter inference often relies on computationally- intensive techniques. Approximate Bayesian Computation, or ABC, methods based on summary statistics have become increasingly popular. A particular flavor of ABC based on using a linear regression to approximate the posterior distribution of the parameters, conditional on the summary statistics, is computationally appealing, yet no standalone tool exists to automate the procedure. Here, I describe a program to implement the method. Results: The software package ABCreg implements the local linear-regression approach to ABC. The advantages are: 1. The code is stan