Julian Besag

Julian Ernst Besag FRS (26 March 1945 – 6 August 2010) was a British statistician known chiefly for his work in spatial statistics (including its applications to epidemiology, image analysis and agricultural science), and Bayesian inference (including Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms).

Early life and education

Besag was born in

Career

He then spent a year as a

He therefore suggested using multivariate distributions for such a variable, taking inspiration from statistical physics and unpublished work by Peter Clifford and John Hammersley:^[1]

${\displaystyle P[Y_{i,j}|Y_{k,l}:(k,l)\neq (i,j)]}$

He published his findings to the Royal Statistical Society in March 1974.^[2]

Death

Besag died in Bristol, 2010 following a surgery.^[1]

Notable publications

• Besag, J. (1974) "Spatial Interaction and the Statistical Analysis of Lattice Systems",
  JSTOR 2984812
• Besag, J. (1975) "Statistical Analysis of Non-Lattice Data." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series D, 24(3), 179–195.
  JSTOR 2987782
• Besag, J. (1977) "Comments on Ripley's paper." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 39(2), 193–195
• Besag, J.E. (1986) "On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 48, 259–302.
  JSTOR 2345426
• Besag, J.; York, J.; Mollié, A. (1991). "Bayesian image restoration, with two applications in spatial statistics". Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. 43 (1): 1–20.
  S2CID 13799826
  .