MacMCMC (v2.1)

State-of-the-art Data Analysis for Mac OS X™

To see MacMCMC in action, consider this famous example from the literature (Arnold and Libby, 1949):

Carbon-14 Dating

Input Data Model

Output Report Trace Marginals

Given the MacMCMC report, any graphing software may be used to prepare a plot showing model versus data.
Note: The blue line in this plot uses mean estimates; the red line shows the prior uncertainty for parameter A.

Principal Features

General

• Complete, standalone Mac application
• 100% Bayesian inference
• Advanced functionality
• Access to low-level options
• Parallelized for maximum speed
• 100% ensemble MCMC
  Note: If you are unfamiliar with how MCMC works, there is a very brief description and a quick, albeit trivial, online demo available here.

Specifics

• Input data and model in ASCII plaintext (UTF-8)
• Live editing of model
• 27 built-in distributions
• 19 continous (incl. Bi- and TrivariateNormal)
• 8 discrete
• User-defined distributions
• Generic (continuous)
• DiscreteGeneric
• Mixture
• [Optional] Post-processing for homogeneous mixtures
• Automatic relabeling of component indices
• Output of component probabilities for datapoints
• 22 built-in functions
• [Optional] "Extras" category for ancillary quantities
• Output
• Report
• Input summary
• Run setup options
• Runtime
• [Optional] log(marginal likelihood)
• Monitored variables
• MAP, Mean, Median, Mode and Gelman-Rubin statistic
• 90, 95 and 99-percent credible (HPD) intervals
• Trace (thinned, tabular posterior)
• Plots of marginals
• [Optional] Editing of axis labels
• [Optional] Fourier smoothing
• [Optional] Save as PDF and/or PNG
• Trace comparison for any two chains
• [Optional] Goodness-of-fit plots (in most cases)
• Equations: X-Y plot
• Continuous distributions: quantile-quantile (q-q) plot
• Discrete distributions: PMF histogram
• [Optional] 95-percent posterior-predictive credible-interval band(s)
• [Optional] Editing of axis labels
• Examples:
  • 15 ready-to-run examples supplied with package. See descriptions here.
  • A complete and detailed case study. See here.

Access

Platform Requirements

View the Documentation.

For those who prefer a simpler, frequentist application, Regress+ 2.8 is still available here. Note, however, that frequentist methodology is becoming increasingly outdated.

Who Uses MacMCMC ?

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