Nonparametric Bayesian methods: a gentle introduction and overview

Nonparametric Bayesian methods have seen rapid and sustained growth over the past 25 years. We present a gentle introduction to the methods, motivating the methods through the twin perspectives of consistency and false consistency. We then step through the various constructions of the Dirichlet process, outline a number of the basic properties of this process and move on to the mixture of Dirichlet processes model, including a quick discussion of the computational methods used to fit the model. We touch on the main philosophies for nonparametric Bayesian data analysis and then reanalyze a famous data set. The reanalysis illustrates the concept of admissibility through a novel perturbation of the problem and data, showing the benefit of shrinkage estimation and the much greater benefit of nonparametric Bayesian modelling. We conclude with a too-brief survey of fancier nonparametric Bayesian methods.