The concept of conditional specification of distributions is not new but, except in normal families, it has not been well developed in the literature. Computational difficulties undoubtedly hindered or discouraged developments in this direction. However, such roadblocks are of dimished importance today. Questions of compatibility of conditional and marginal specifications of distributions are of fundamental importance in modeling scenarios. Models with conditionals in exponential families are particularly tractable and provide useful models in a broad variety of settings.
From the reviews: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION "...clearly written and accessible with relatively few mathematical prerequisites. I found surprisingly few typographical errors; the authors are to be congratulated for this...Each chapter contains numerous exercises. These exercises appear to be at an appropriate level for a graduate course in statistics, and appear to provide appropriate reinforcement for the material in the preceding chapters." B.J.T. Morgan in "Short Book Reviews", Vol. 20/3, December 2000 "The book is well written, and presents clearly an important and developing subject."







