Fig. 1

a A kernel density plot of regression coefficient \(\beta _0\) (the log of the baseline hazard) in the exponential survival regression model comparing two methods; b a kernel density plot of regression coefficient \(\beta _1\) (the log of the hazard ratio in patients who maintain additional cycles of chemo relative to patients who do not) comparing two methods; c a kernel density plot of deviance functions comparing two methods by manual computation of deviance from posterior samples (based upon the exact likelihood). The two vertical lines show the mean deviances generated via the dic.samples() function by the two methods