FAQ

How should I cite OpenBUGS?

The best reference is Lunn, D., Spiegelhalter, D., Thomas, A., Best, N. (2009). {The BUGS project: Evolution, critique, and future directions}, {\it Statistics in Medicine}, {\bf 28}, 3049-3067.

Older distributions of OpenBUGS included several different user interfaces, which were given different names, but all executed the same numerical code. The version with the most potential for confusion was the GUI interface, which was named "WinBUGS.exe". It has been replaced by "OpenBUGS.exe". The Linux version of the program was called linBUGS; the different components of the Linux distribution are now named OpenBUGS, and the version numbers on Linux match the Windows version numbers. The older distributions also contained a Windows program called "ClassicBUGS.exe". ClassicBUGS was designed as a command-line script interpreter with the same functionality as the Linux version of the program. "ClassicBUGS.exe" has been eliminated. Instructions in the "Scripts and Batch-Mode' section of the User Manual contain instructions for batch command-line script execution in Windows using OpenBUGS.exe.

OpenBUGS has been successfully installed on Macs using Wine. The installer sometimes closes with an error message, but appears to work despite the error message.

When there are multiple chains, a single update is generated for each chain and then the cycle is repeated for the requested number of updates. Random numbers are currently generated from a single random number sequence shared across the chains. If thin>1 is requested, thin updates are drawn from the first chain, then thin updates are generated from the second chain, ..., and then the cycle is repeated. As a consequence, the updates when thin>1 is not equivalent to generating the chains with thin=1 storing only a spaced subset of the updates. The latter approach is implemented by the thin option in the samples submenu of the inference menu.