Acknowledgments
The course upon which this book is based was developed and taught by us at Colorado State University from 1994 onwards. Thanks are due to our many students who have been semiwilling guinea pigs over the years. We also thank our colleagues in the Statistics Department for their continued support. The late Richard Tweedie merits particular acknowledgment for his mentoring during the early years of our careers.
We owe a great deal of intellectual debt to Adrian Raftery, who deserves special thanks not only for his teaching and advising, but also for his unwavering support and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of good ideas. In addition, we thank our influential advisors and teachers at the University of Washington Statistics Department, including David Madigan, Werner Stuetzle, and Judy Zeh. Of course, each of our chapters could be expanded into a full-length book, and great scholars have already done so. We owe much to their efforts, upon which we relied when developing our course and our manuscript.
Portions of the first edition were written at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand, whose faculty we thank for graciously hosting us during our sabbatical in 2003. Much of our work on the second edition was undertaken during our sabbatical visit to the Australia Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization in 2009–2010, sponsored by CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics, and hosted at the Longpocket ...
