Summary
BITE is a software package designed for the analysis of event history data using flexible hierarchical models and Bayesian inference, with a particular emphasis on the application of flexible intensities as a description of the distribution of lifetimes. BITE provides a framework for combining flexible baseline hazard rates and observed data into intensity processes. Inclusion of covariate information is possible, and data can be non-informatively and independently filtered, or censored. The model and the data are described by a command language and data are stored into text files. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used for numerical approximation of expectations with respect to the posterior. Output consists of (i) parameter values stored during simulations, (ii) estimated expectations of functionals of parameters, or (iii) graphs (created with Splus or R software packages) presenting point-wise expectations (and credibility intervals) of the baseline hazard rates.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Elja Arjas for many useful comments, corrections, and suggestions on this manuscript. Also the helpful comments of Mervi Eerola are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks to Marko Salmenkivi for an introduction to flex and bison. The support of KTL has been important in completing this manuscript.
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Appendix
Appendix
BITE was written in C language for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. It can also be run on 32-bit Microsoft Windows systems, but a Unix-emulator called Cygwin (see http://www.cygwin.com) is recommended. BITE can be downloaded at http://www.rni.helsinki.fi/~tth/bite.html
The software is free for educational and research use, see URL-address above for the copyright. The distribution contains User’s manual (Härkänen 2002) and examples.
The convergence of the MCMC is checked by using the CODA (Best et at. 1996) software package. The output files of BITE are not directly compatible as input for CODA, so the distribution of BITE contains a Perl script called tmp2coda which transforms the sampled and saved Markov chain values of the scalar and vector parameters into the *. ind and *. out files for CODA.
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Härkänen, T. BITE: A Bayesian Intensity Estimator. Computational Statistics 18, 565–583 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03354617
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03354617