MacMCMC (v1.6)
State-of-the-art Data Analysis for Mac OS X™
MacMCMC is a free and extremely powerful application for the analysis of data of any kind. It is one half of a two-part project. The other half is a free ebook—a strongly recommended preliminary—available here.
To see MacMCMC in action, consider this famous example from the literature (Arnold and Libby, 1949):
Carbon-14 Dating
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
- 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 with ASCII plaintext (UTF-8)
- Live editing of model
- 29 built-in distributions
- 18 continous (incl. BivariateNormal)
- 8 discrete
- 3 (homogeneous) mixtures
- Normal and BivariateNormal
- Poisson
- Generic (user-defined) distribution
- 20 built-in functions
- [Optional] "Extras" category for ancillary quantities
- Output files for monitored variables
- Report
- MAP, Mean, Median, Mode and Gelman-Rubin statistic
- 90, 95 and 99-percent credible (HPD) intervals
- [Optional] Computation of log(marginal likelihood)
- Trace (thinned, tabular posterior)
- Plots of marginals
- Output as pdf and/or png
- [Optional] Editing of axis labels
- [Optional] Fourier smoothing of plot
- Trace comparison for selected chains
- [Optional] Special handling for built-in mixtures
- Automatic relabeling
- Output of class probabilities for datapoints
- [Optional] Goodness-of-fit plots (in most cases)
- Equations: X-Y plot
- Continuous distributions: quantile-quantile (q-q) plot
- Discrete distributions: PDF histogram
- [Optional] 95-percent posterior-predictive credible interval band
- Examples:
- 15 ready-to-run examples supplied with package. See descriptions here.
- A complete and detailed case study. See here.
Access
MacMCMC (v1.6), signed and notorized, may be downloaded (20.1 Mb, disk image) for free at
MacMCMC
No license or registration required.
Platform Requirements
MacMCMC (v1.6) is written for MacOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later. (Version 2.0 is in development.)
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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Feedback
Please send comments and any other feedback to
this address.
This page last updated on 1 January 2024.