The book assumes minimal knowledge of statistics, and no previous knowledge of demography. The authors have developed a set of R packages implementing the methods. Data and code for all applications in the book are available on www.bdef-book.com.
"This book will be welcome for the scientific community of forecasters...as it presents a new approach which has already given important results and which, in my opinion, will increase its importance in the future." ~Daniel Courgeau, Institut national d'études démographiques
John Bryant is a senior researcher at Statistics New Zealand. He has previously worked at the New Zealand Treasury, and at universities in New Zealand and Thailand. He has consulted for many international organizations, including UNICEF, the FAO, and the World Bank. His research interests include applied demography, data science, and Bayesian statistics.
Junni L. Zhang is an associate professor of statistics at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. Her research interests include Bayesian statistics, text mining, and causal inference. She has extensive experience teaching undergraduate, graduate, MBA and executive courses, and is the author of Data Mining and Its Applications (in Chinese).