planetwater

ground- water, geo- statistics, environmental- engineering, earth- science

Days 2&3 at #spatialstatistics2017

without comments

It became increasingly difficult to post updates on the spatial statistics conference. The icebreaker, another day full with diverse interesting talks, the dinner, another day that ended the conference with an interesting session honouring the achievements of Peter Diggle. Former and current colleagues such as Paulo Ribeiro and Emanuel Giorgi gave enlightening talks that stressed both the scientific achievements and the great kindness and humanity of Peter Diggle. CHICAS, the center for health informatics, computing, and statistics, is the current culmination of his efforts.

It’s hard to pick topics that stood out during the last two days of the conference, just because there were many great talks on a large variety of topics. Here is an attempt.

Point Processes

There were a number of talks covering Point Processes, notably the keynotes by Thordis Thorarinsdottir and Rasmus Waagepetersen. Thordis had a variety of interesting quotes including this one by Frank H Bigelow from 1905:

There are three processes that are generally essential for the complete development of any branch of science, and they must be accurately applied before the subject can be considered to be satisfactorily explained. The first is the discovery of a mathematical analysis, the second is the discussion of numerous observations, and the third is a correct application of the mathematics to the observations, including a demonstration that these are in agreement.

Thordis urged the need for more and better inference methods. I might be worth pointing out that Bigelow went on to state that

Often a good theory is misapplied to good observations, or good observations are explained by a poor theory.

In summary, these thoughts are not too far away from Peter Diggle’s triangle, pictured above.

Copulas

There were two nice talks that employed copulas for multivariate spatial models and one that I missed, unfortunately:

  • Jonathan Tawn from the University of Lancaster presented on “Modelling Spatial Extreme Events“; he takes great care of marginal distributions and how to reasonably include extremes there for a better joint representation in copula space;
  • Fakhereh Alidoost and Alfred Stein from the University of Twente presented on “Interpolation of Daily Mean Air Temperature Data via Spatial and Non-Spatial Copulas
  • the talk that I missed was entitled “Hierarchical Copula Regression Models for Areal Data” presented by D. Musgrove, J. Hughes and L. Eberly

Various

Written by Claus

July 12th, 2017 at 3:48 pm

Posted in

Leave a Reply