Dear all,
I have been reading the thread on inconsistent chains across computers
with interest and I would like to make a few comments on that. The fact
that the chains were inconsistent showed that sometimes WInBUGS may be
giving wrong results on some platforms. However, what if WinBUGS had
produced consistent (but wrong) chains? I believe that this would be a
major problem.
This is why I would suggest that some sort of tests could be developed
with the aim of assessing whether WinBUGS is running properly on
different platforms. A test could be designed to run some of the
examples provided with WinBUGS and then testing whether the results
produced "match" the true solution (which should be known beforehand and
provided in different files).
Designing tests is common practice when developing software that can be
run on different platforms (such as, for example, the R programming
language).
As far as I know, there are (at least) two major versions of BUGS
(WinBUGS and OpenBUGS) and these can be run on multiple platforms
(Windows, Linux and Mac). There are many flavours of Windows, as well as
many different Linux distributions, on which BUGS is run via other
software (WINE mainly). I also know that some people are running BUGS on
big clusters of computers.
So, as I see it, many things could be twisted and it would be good to
have a way of (automatically) assessing that WinBUGS is running smoothly
and producing the right results and that the local architecture/platform
is not interfering.
We could, of course, run some of the examples that comes with BUGS
ourselves, but I would say that an automated way of running them and
checking their results would be very welcome.
Best wishes,
Virgilio
--
Virgilio Gómez Rubio
Departamento de Matemáticas
Escuela de Ingenieros Industriales de Albacete
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha
Avda. España s/n
02071 Albacete - SPAIN
Tel: 967 59 92 00 ext. 2443
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