Gibbs Sampling and the Paleothermometer
Every glass thermometer has subtle variations in the size and shape of the bulb at the bottom and the capillary tube inside, as well as variations in the width of gradations on the side. The compounded effect of these uncertainties is that each thermometer reads temperature slightly differently. - Sam Kean I loved dinosaurs, I loved space, and I thought maybe I'd be the first paleo-astronaut. -Bill Maris A while ago, I wrote about using Gibbs sampling for spline regression. The motivation for that post was this paper BAYSPLINE: A New Calibration for the Alkenone Paleothermometer by Jessica E. Tierney and Martin P. Tingley. (It's behind a paywall. I'll spare you my rant about taxpayer supported research being a profit center for private companies.) There is accompanying software to the paper in Python and MATLAB . In this post, I'll use the the R software presented previously to reproduce the results from the Tierney and Tingley paper. A few marine s...