Computer Intensive Methods in Statistics

The computer has created new fields in statistic. Numerical and statistical problems that were untackable five to ten years ago can now be computed even on portable personal computers. A computer intensive task is for example the numerical calculation of posterior distributions in Bayesian analysis. The Bootstrap and image analysis are two other fields spawned by the almost unlimited computing power. It is not only the computing power through that has revolutionized statistics, the graphical interactiveness on modern statistical environments has given us the possibility for deeper insight into our data. On November 21,22 1991 a conference on computer Intensive Methods in Statistics has been organized at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. The organizers were Jan Beirlant (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Wolfgang Hardie (Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin) and Leopold Simar (Universite Catholique de Louvain and Facultes Universitaires Saint-Louis). The meeting was the Xllth in the series of the Rencontre Franco-Beige des Statisticians. Following this tradition both theoretical statistical results and practical contributions of this active field of statistical research were presented. The four topics that have been treated in more detail were: Bayesian Computing; Interfacing Statistics and Computers; Image Analysis; Resampling Methods. Selected and refereed papers have been edited and collected for this book. 1) Bayesian Computing.