Bayesians
in BRAZIL
(
by Sergio Wechsler and Basílio B. Pereira)
|
"
Let us suppose that an individual, I , is provided with a certain set,
C , of knowledge and that I ought to behave
dependently
on the ocurrence or not of a given event, E ."
" ... the subjective notion of probability aims exactly to measure this degree ... of belief... "
These
are excerpts (translated from Portuguese) from the "Introduction to Probability
Calculus" class notes used during
the
Fifties at ENCE (Escola Nacional de Ciencias Estatisticas - National School
of Statistical Siences) in Rio de Janeiro.
The
notes were written by Professor Rio Nogueira and constitute the earliest
reference to subjective probability we have
found
in Brazilian writings. In fact, it is a nice surprise to find a Brazilian
relative I of de Finetti's character You ! [ENCE
still
exists and is na undergraduate school of Statistics maintained by IBGE
, the Brazilian Census Institute. A few of the
people
mentioned below gratuated from ENCE].
Let
us now move to the Sixties at Berkeley, where Caio Dantas, a probabilist
from Sao Paulo, attended the seminars
held
by David Blackwell and Lester Dubins. Dantas brought back a Bayesian
seed (and also Blackwell's Basic Statistics
book)
to USP (Universidade de Sao Paulo) where Carlos Pereira wrote up a Bayesian
MA dissertation. A few years later,
Carlos
went to Florida to get his PhD from Debabrata Basu. Upon his return to
USP in the late Seventies, Bayesian
activities
in Brazilian academia finally unfolded in a strong and regular fashion.
The multiple - but always Bayesian -
interests
of Carlos Pereira influenced many researchers at Sao Paulo. Among his early
PhD students we find the
geneticist
Andre Rogatko. Josemar Rodrigues was at USP faculty and wrote several papers
jointly with Carlos Pereira
on
linear models and finite populations. Another faculty member, Heleno Bolfarine,
returned from Berkeley in 1982 to
start
a brilliant career on Bayesian theoretical statistics.
At
that time in Rio Basilio Pereira, a student of Sir David Cox, started
to supervise some Bayesian students and hosted a
first
visit of Adrian Smith of three months in 1980. Basilio (Carlos' brother)
proceeded and created the Bayesian
atmosphere
at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) where Marlos Viana, Helio
Migon and Dani Gamerman would
later
appear to make the department an excellence center on Bayesian research
with sound contributions in
econometrics,
dynamical models, time series, epidemiology, survival analysis, stochastic
simulation.
We
are by now in the Eighties and our story becomes way less linear as the
branches of the Brazilian Bayesian tree start
to
become many. At São Paulo, Carlos Pereira, Josemar Rodrigues,
Heleno Bolfarine and Jorge Achcar established a
firm
research activity and influenced many young people to follow Bayesian careers.
Jose Galvao Leite wrote his PhD
dissertation
on Bayesian capture-recapture sampling under Carlos Pereira supervision.
His MA students Telba Irony and
Angela
Mariotto went to get their doctoral degrees from Dick Barlow on Bayesian
industrial engineering and Sir Cox,
respectively.
In Rio de Janeiro, Helio Migon and Dani Gamerman had returned from Warwick,
having obtained their
PhD
degrees under the supervision of Jeff Harrison and Mike West, respectively.
Helio and Dani have been supervising
Bayesian
dissertations since 1987 at COPPE/UFRJ (Graduate School of Engineering/UFRJ)
and from now on at their
home
department, DME (Statistical Methods Department), which has just started
to offer a regular PhD program in
Bayesian
Statistics.
During
the Nineties, Bayesian activities in Brazil started to make good impact
in other countries as foreign students
returned
to them. From USP Daniel Paulino returned to Portugal after getting a PhD
from Carlos Pereira. Victor Salinas
Torres
and Pilar Iglesias, both from Chile and both Pereira's PhD students returned.
Back in Chile, Pilar Iglesias has
been
provoking good Bayesian earthquakes since then. Luis Eduardo Montoya Delgado
is back in Colombia after a
superb
PhD on DNA profiling for paternity investigation. Veronica Gonzalez-Lopez
in Argentina is the most recent
member
of this impressive list of Carlos' PhD students. Paulino worked on identifiability,
Torres on Bayesian
non-parametrics
and Dirichlet process, Pilar on predictivistic representations, and Lopez
on Bayesian concepts of
dependence.
At the same department, Heleno Bolfarine supervised students like
Reynaldo Arellano Valle whose PhD
dissertation
won a first prize award at the Bernoulli Society Clapem contest. Valle
is back in Chile and worked on
external
predivistic representations of elliptical families. Loretta Gasco at Peru
and Patricia Gimenez at Mar del Plata
were
also Bolfarine's doctoral students. Heleno Bolfarine and Pilar Iglesias
were PhD advisers to Marcia Branco and
Rosangela
Loschi. All this people have very strong and active scientific collaboration.
We have recent papers by
Gonzalez-Lopez
and Nelson Tanaka, Bolfarine and Valle and so on, not to mention Pilar
Iglesias whose admirable drive
puts
almost everyone to work.
The
brand new generation of Brazilian Bayesians includes Lurdes Inoue who after
a PhD from Donald Berry at Duke is
now
at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at Houston and Hedibert Lopes who also
graduated from Duke and is now at
UFRJ
faculty. Both got MA degrees in Brazil formerly, Lurdes from Sergio Wechsler
and Hedibert from Helio Migon. A list
of
several almost-PhD Brazilian Bayesian students at USP, UFRJ, Duke, Sheffield
.... could be given but we prefer to
hurry
them up (not to mention that we intend to write the Second part of this
story ten years from now).
Before
getting too close to year 2000, we should remember the series of
bi-annual Bayesian Brazilian Seminars held
since
1991. The first one was at Sao Carlos and chaired by Josemar Rodrigues
and Sergio Wechsler. In 1993, the
Seminar
was held jointly with the International Bayesian Hierarchical Meeting of
Rio de Janeiro organized by Dani
Gamerman
and Helio Migon and attended by Bayesians like Jose Bernardo, Adrian Smith
and Phil Dawid (who would
return
for the third Brazilian Bayesian two years later). Before that , in 1992,
we had in Rio a joint Brazil-US Meeting on
Bayesian
Econometrics chaired by Ruben Klein and attended by Arnold Zellner and
J. Kadane among many others.
[Omissions
are unavoidable at this point and we apologize for this. Jim Berger, Susie
Bayarri, Ed George, D.Poirier, S.
Geisser,
Alicia Carriquiry, Tony O'Hagan, Steven Fienberg, J. Press Luis Pericchi
among again many others were also in
Brazil
a couple of opportunities. The department at USP was visited
by Dev Basu, Dennis Lindley and Dick Barlow.
Adrian
Smith and Tony O'Hagan visited UFRJ more than once]. During the 1992 Meeting
a vote was taken for the
creation
of ISBA.
Also
during the Nineties a diffusion of Bayesian ideas and methods occurred
among researchers from other areas and
statisticians
and probabilists who would not consider themselves exclusively "Bayesians":
we find outstanding
contributions
from Pablo Ferrari on Image Restoration, Antonio Galves on Linguistics,
both at USP, Renato Assuncao at
UFMG
(Federal University at Minas Gerais) on Spatial Statistics and Disease
Control, Pedro Morettin (USP) on Time
Series.
We
should also list the bibliographical contributions of Brazilian Bayesian
authors: to mention books only, Heleno
Bolfarine
is co-author of S. Zacks' book on Finite Populaton Estimation, Dani
Gamerman wrote " Monte Carlo Markov
Chain:
Stochastic Simulation for Bayesian Inference " and, jointly with Helio
Migon, " Statistical Inference: an Integrated
Approach
" . Going back to the beginning, we find translations to Portuguese of
Blackwell's Basic Statistics and Raiffa's
Decision
Analysis already in the early Seventies. Carlos Pereira and Marlos Viana
wrote a book in 1982 on Introductory
Bayesian
Statistics which was never translated from Portuguese.
Bayesian
research activities are now very active in Brazilian universities with
strong interaction with universities
abroad.
Last year the Brazilian Bayesians decided to create a Brazilian Chapter
of ISBA. The new Chapter made the
decision
to host the First " Latin American Bayesian Meeting " ( I COBAL) to be
held very probably on January 2002 in
Brazil.