ABSTRACT
According to Everitt and Pickles (2004), Bayesian statistics were, until relatively recently, little more than an intellectual curiosity, rich in conceptual insight but of little practical value when it came to actual data analysis. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Bayesian methods and applications have become an area of intense activity. The obvious question that arises is ‘why?’ But before we try to answer this, we need to get clear just what Bayesian methods are. In short, a Bayesian approach has been described in Spiegelhalter, Abrams, and Myles (2004) as ‘the explicit quantitative use of external evidence in the design, monitoring, analysis, interpretation and reporting of a health-care evaluation’.
