October 2012

• The BUGS Book
  We are pleased to announce that, after many years in development,The BUGS Book – A Practical Introduction to Bayesian Analysis By David Lunn, Christopher Jackson, Nicky Best, Andrew Thomas and David Spiegelhalterwill be published this month by CRC Press / Chapman and Hall. Please see the book’s supporting website for more information.

May 2011

• False reports from antivirus software
  Some antivirus packages give alerts encountering the WinBUGS or OpenBUGS (www.openbugs.net) executables. None of these reports are correct, and can be ignored provided you downloaded from our websites. Most antivirus packages allow you to disable specific warnings although you may have to be the administrator to do this.

December 2008

• WinBUGS 1.4.x is now immortal!
  We no longer require users to register to obtain the key for unrestricted use, and the key is now everlasting.
  Please click here to download the key

October 2008

• Error in GeoBUGS manual
  The syntax given in the GeoBUGS manual for defining the scale of a map is wrong. In the manual we say that the syntax is:
  xScale: 1000
  yScale: 1000
  whereas, in fact, it should be
  Xscale: 1000
  Yscale: 1000

August 2008

• WinBUGS courses in India
  INSEED (Indic Society for Education and Development) announces the following two workshops/courses this year.
  (1) “Statistical Models and Practices in Epidemiology” to be organised jointly with the Department of Statistics, Manipal University, Karnataka from 24-28 November, 2008. Please visit the workshop website http://www.inseed.org/workshops/stat-epi2008/ for details.
  (2) “Bayesian statistics using OpenBUGS and R” to be organised at the Department of Statistics, St. Thomas College, Pala, Kerala from 08-12 December, 2008. Please visit the workshop website http://www.inseed.org/workshops/r-bugs2008/ for details.
• Possible solution to the Vista issue — see July 2007 below
  Apparently WinBUGS can be installed directly in Vista by right-clicking the .exe file and selecting “Run as administrator”.
• New tools available
  WinBUGS and OpenBUGS can now be run from GenStat (Edition 10 onwards) using the command BGXGENSTAT. More information is available from http://www.vsni.co.uk/products/genstat/htmlhelp/winbugs/WinBUGS.htm.
  Wayne Thogmartin and colleagues have developed an extension for ArcGIS that helps users of WinBUGS develop the adjacency matrices they need for their CAR spatial models.
  Patrick Bélisle has created a series of WinBUGS related macros, including Perl programs that automatically write and run WinBUGS scripts, and create nice summary output from the program’s run. There is also a macro to convert multi-dimensional SAS data sets to WinBUGS format.

September 2007

• Patch to upgrade to 1.4.3
  A new cumulative patch is available with a few minor additions to 1.4.2. Details and download from the patch page.

July 2007

• Installation advice for Windows Vista users
  There appears to be a problem with installing WinBUGS and/or various patches in Windows Vista. Vista doesn’t seem to like anyone overwriting files in the “C:\Program Files” directory (regardless of permissions). Hence we recommend that WinBUGS be installed elsewhere, e.g. “C:\”.

March 2007

• Patch to upgrade to 1.4.2
  A new cumulative patch is available with a few minor additions to 1.4.1. Details and download from the patch page.

May 2006

• OpenBUGS developers list
  There’s now a separate mailing list for people interested in developing BUGS via OpenBUGS (e.g. writing new functions, distributions, updaters). To subscribe either go to the home page and click on Join or leave the list. Or send an email to jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk and include in the body of the text JOIN BUGS-DEVELOPERS Firstname Lastname.
• DIC FAQs
  There is now an extensive list of FAQs on the DIC page.
• Remote running of WinBUGS
  More links have been added to the remote running page page, particularly regarding runing WinBUGS from Stata.

January 2006

• FishBay 2006 Workshop
  Constructing Fishery management models using Bayesian inference – a practitioners approach Nuuk, March 22-26 2006 at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources

October 2004

• These webpages have been revised and updated, mainly to reflect changes now OpenBUGS is available. This site will continue to host all WinBUGS-related material, up to and including version 1.4.x, but is not intended as the primary reference point for anything more advanced or experimental.As usual, if you find any broken links, missing files, or just want to let us know about a WinBUGS-related resource, please get in touch.

September 2004

• The code behind BUGS and WinBUGS is now available in open source format – OpenBUGS is the next generation of the BUGS project. A substantive OpenBUGS website with the code, manuals, discussion forum and much else is now available.

July 2004

• Phil Woodward has developed BugsXLA v2.1, an Excel Add-in GUI for WinBUGS. No knowledge of WinBUGS required!

June 2004

• We have recently found a bug in the WinBUGS syntax interpreter that may, in some circumstances, lead to incorrect interpretation of models; click here for details. This is clearly very serious, and we are trying to get a patch sorted out as quickly as possible.(Note this is now fixed, click here for a software patch)

March 2004

• Congratulations to Nicky Best, who has been awarded the Royal Statistical Society’s Guy Medal in Bronze for 2004. This is for her “pioneering work on the effective use of Bayesian hierarchical models for complex variability in medicine and epidemiology, her communication of these ideas to a wide statistical audience, and her contributions in making BUGS software easily accessible to users.”

July 2003

• The current key for WinBUGS 1.4 expire on 31st July. Everyone who has registered since January (over 3200 of you) should have been sent a new key valid until December 31st 2003, if they left a correct email address. Otherwise the new key can be obtained by re-registering as usual.

May 2003

• We are taking the first steps in allowing users to alter the code that runs WinBUGS. The release of the WinBUGS Development Interface (WBDev) is designed to allow restricted access to areas of the WinBUGS source that have been used for defining elements of the BUGS language, i.e. the various distributions and functions that are available for specifying statistical models. More details on this exciting development can be found in Dave Lunn’s article on WBDev, which will appear in the next ISBA bulletin.

April 2003

• We now have a website exclusively for the development and distribution of extensions to WinBUGS – see the WinBUGS development site.

January 2003

• The full release of WinBUGS1.4 is now freely available. See the main WinBUGS1.4 page for details on how to download the file and register for the key, together with descriptions of the additional features
• The new WinBUGS1.4 includes a scripting facility, so you can set WinBUGS code running from external programs. Various bits of software to help you do this are available from the Remote Running Page
• We have produced some New Examples to illustrate some of the new features available in WinBUGS1.4.

October 2002

• The long-awaited WinBUGS1.4 beta is now freely available.
• Watch the premiere of WinBUGS – The Movie! – a short Flash illustration of the basic steps of running WinBUGS.

November 2001

• A BUGS workshop took place at the Royal Statistical Society in London on October 22 2001. You can download the examples discussed and copies of the presentations.
• Andrew Millard’s `WinBUGS and Bayesian tools for Archaeology’ site and Joe Ibrahim’s Bayesian Biostatistics course: have been added to the BUGS resources page.

August 2001

• A BUGS workshop is taking place at the Royal Statistical Society in London on October 22 2001.

May 2000

• A full version of WinBUGS 1.3 is available. This should have many of the bugs in WinBUGS 1.2 removed, and has a few new features.
• With WinBUGS 1.3 you can run Dave Lunn’s PKBUGS program for pharmacokinetic modelling.
• A test version of GeoBUGS demonstrates the fitting and displaying of spatial models.
• CODA version 0.5-1 for R is now available from Martyn Plummer.
• Brian Smith has produced a new version of the BOA (Bayesian Output Analysis) suite of S-plus/R functions for analysis of MCMC output. Version 0.5.0 is now available.
• Saghir Bashir has produced a set of tutorial slides on drawing Doodles and running WinBUGS 1.3, which are downloadable as a pdf file.
• A version of Classic BUGS 0.603 for Sparc stations and its shell script are available with the multivariate normal error corrected. Please try it and let us know if it works or does not work with your problem!

November 1999

• The website has been extensively redesigned – we hope you like it!
• Additional FAQ’s have been added for WinBUGS.
• Several additional links have been added, including the following:
  • Simon Jackman’s social science examples
  • DeBUG – German BUGS user group, which offers an online search of relevant articles
  • Running WinBUGS on Linux using Wine: details from Martyn Plummer
  • An excellent page of WinBUGS examples from Calgary

August 1999

A whole-day practical workshop on Disease Mapping using the GeoBUGS Software is being held at Imperial College in London on Saturday 18th December 1999.

20 May 1999

A beta test version of WinBUGS 1.2 is now available. Follow the link from the WinBUGS page.Please note bugs in parts of Classic BUGS Version 0.6: Multivariate normal, probit as function (link is fine), loggam and logfact functions.

April 1999

Bayesian Output Analysis software: Brian Smith, from the Division of Biostatistics at The University of Iowa College of Medicine, has produced a new set of S-plus/R functions for analysis of MCMC output called BOA (Bayesian Output Analysis). Version 0.4.3 is available from the web.Probit bug in WinBUGS 1.1.1 – please note that the probit function and the cumulative normal function in WinBUGS contain an error and should not be used until Version 1.2 comes out. Sorry about this.

February 1999

CODA problems: version 0.4 crashes when run under SPlus version 5.0. Brian Smith, from the Division of Biostatistics at The University of Iowa College of Medicine, has made substantial revisions to CODA Version 0.4 to get rid of the problems caused by the use of global variables.Statement on Year 2000 conformity status of BUGS software: Neither BUGS nor WinBUGS makes any use of date information at any stage, and therefore we would not expect any problems regarding Year 2000. This software is, however, provided free of charge and attention is drawn to the conditions in the licensing agreements. Tutorial available: a gzipped PostScript version of a recent tutorial on Bayesian statistics, Gibbs sampling and BUGS (four slides to a page) is now available for downloading.

August 1998

There appears to be a bug in the multivariate normal sampler for BUGS version 0.6. Users who need to use a multivariate normal are advised to use Version 0.5 or WinBUGS. We are very sorry about this and hope to get it sorted out as soon as possible.

July 1998

The test version of WinBUGS has been updated to Version 1.1.1 (this replaces the withdrawn Version 1.1). This allows input from rectangular arrays, and output of results in a format suitable for CODA. Radford Neal’s ordered over-relaxation method for reducing the auto-correlation of Gibbs runs is now an option, and an improved Metropolis algorithm has also been included. Unfortunately Doodles produced from WinBUGS 1.0 will no longer run.We have decided to delay the formation of the vast BUGS financial empire, and so we are currently giving away the key that allows unrestricted use of WinBUGS for users that register with us. The form is on the WinBUGS information page.The first draft of a FAQ page is now up and running, and we shall try to keep it updated. It covers bugs, error messages, advice on modelling, and some comments on MCMC simulations in BUGS.Martyn Plummer has translated and upgraded CODA into R, and it’s available from the web. This now means that it is unnecessary to have S-plus to run the diagnostics in CODA, since R (which is free) can be used instead. Details on obtaining R are on Martyn’s website.

A discussion on `Will domain-specific code synthesis become a silver bullet?’ was recently featured in the Trends and Controversies section of IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications. This includes an article on BUGS (and unfortunately some criminal-looking mugshots).

September 1997

BUGS version 0.6 is now available for SPARC and DOS; version 0.6 is also available for LINUX and SGI but has not been rigorously tested for these platforms.

• Further details available in the README file
• The BUGS 0.6 program can be downloaded from our anonymous ftp site ftp.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk in directory pub/methodology/bugs/software/bugs06 or from the Classic BUGS section of our site
• An Addendum to the current Manual for BUGS 0.5 is available which contains additional information relating to BUGS 0.6
  • Further details are available in the README file
  • On-line and postscript versions are available from our site
  • A postscript version can be downloaded from our anonymous ftp site ftp.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk in directory pub/methodology/bugs/docs
• CODA version 0.4 is now available, which is essentially the same as 0.3 but the following bugs have been fixed:
  • Installation instructions for Windows
  • Error in calculating the window widths for Geweke’s convergence diagnostic
  • Changing the working directory in Windows
  • Printing and saving graphics in Windows

  Further details are available in the README file. If you just want the text versions of the substitute S-plus functions, please e-mail us on bugs at mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk.

• A BUGS reference list is now available, divided into methodological papers and applied papers that use the software.
• A test version of WinBUGS is available – this comprises DoodleBUGS, which allows models to be specified graphically, and an educational version of the full WinBUGS program which allows sampling and monitoring to be controlled from a Windows environment. Please note that this program assumes the user already knows about the BUGS philosophy and MCMC in general.

26 July 1996

1. An e-mail discussion list has been set up: send a one line message
   join bugs firstname(s) lastname to mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk.
2. Some bugs have been identified in Version 0.5, and we are currently trying to fix them. These include
   1. The stats command only writes the last monitored node to the bugs1.out file.
   2. There can be system crashes when sampling.
   3. There is an unnecessary check in the compilation that results in very long compilation times for large models.

   Please let us know of any other problems.