Materials for NIMBLE short course at the 2018 ASA ENVR workshop.
All materials for the workshop are here. If you're familiar with Git/Github, you already know how to get all the materials on your computer. If you're not, simply click here.
You can see logistical information and an outline of the workshop content here.
Given we have just a few hours in the short course, I would like all attendees to do a little bit of preparation beforehand if at all possible. Please follow these instructions before arriving at the short course.
- Install NIMBLE (see details below)
- Skim through these (short) modules, which are also hyperlinked in the overview.html document:
- modules/1_nimble_background_slides.html
- modules/2_bugs_language_slides.html (you can skip this if you are familiar with BUGS or JAGS),
- modules/3_build_model_slides.html, and
- the first slide of modules/4_run_mcmc_slides.html.
- Run the code in modules/3_build_model.Rmd and the code in the first section of modules/4_run_mcmc.Rmd (under "One-click MCMC operation") to make sure that your installation works and get a sense for basic usage of NIMBLE.
At the very least, please install NIMBLE and either email me or our Google group if you run into problems.
NIMBLE is an R package on CRAN, so in general it will be straightforward to install as with any R package, but you do need a compiler and related tools on your system.
In summary, here are the steps.
- Install compiler tools on your system. https://r-nimble.org/download has more details on how to install Rtools on Windows and how to install the command line tools of Xcode on a Mac. Note that if you have packages requiring a compiler (e.g., Rcpp) on your computer, you should already have the compiler tools installed.
- Install the nimble package from CRAN.
More details can also be found in Section 4 of the NIMBLE manual.