User’s Manual

The Roadmap is a section that will start each chapter by providing a commented table of contents. It also usually contains indications on the purpose of the chapter.

for instance, in this first chapter, we explain the typographical notations that we adopted to distinguish between the different semantic levels of the course. We also try to detail how one should work with this book and how one could best benefit from this work. This chapter is to be understood as a user’s (or instructor’s) manual that details our pedagogical choices. It also seems the right place to briefly introduce the programming language R, which we use to analyze our datasets. (Note that it is not necessary to understand this language to benefit from the book!) For an introduction to Bayesian statistics and MCMC methods, one has to wait at least until the next chapter.