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SUMMARY:Spatial point process modelling and its applications in ecology - 
 Dr. Janine B. Illian\, University of St. Andrews
DTSTART:20080227T140000Z
DTEND:20080227T150000Z
UID:TALK10649@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Fabien Petitcolas
DESCRIPTION:*Abstract*: Most processes in the natural world take place in 
 a spatial context and are often inherently local\, particularly in plant e
 cology. As a result\, spatially explicit data sets are frequently being co
 llected in ecology. Previously this has been perceived as a difficulty sin
 ce traditional statistical approaches are unsuitable in the presence of sp
 atial autocorrelation. However\, recent years have seen an increasing inte
 rest in explicitly modelling this spatial dependence. \n\nSpatial point pr
 ocesses model the locations of objects such as individual plants\, animals
 \, nests in space. They take local dependence structures\, the environment
  around and properties of the objects into account. A suitable model hence
  characterises the behaviour of every individual object based on a small n
 umber of interpretable parameters.  \n\nA growing number of methods and mo
 dels have been developed within the statistical literature. However\, a la
 rge part of this remains unknown to ecologists. This partly due to the fac
 t that fitting these models is not straight forward and often computationa
 lly involved. In addition\, many approaches have been derived from a rathe
 r mathematical perspective and are thus not necessarily appropriate in an 
 ecological context.\n\nThis talk will present several approaches to develo
 ping point process methodology that may be suitably applied in ecology. It
  provides a number of examples of applications\, including complex and mul
 tivariate point pattern data sets\, modelling inhomogeneous data and marke
 d point processes.\n\n*Biography*: Janine Illian is an RCUK academic fello
 w at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St 
 Andrews. She studied at the Universities of Düsseldorf\, Edinburgh and Ca
 lifornia at Davis. She holds an MSC in psychology and an MSc in mathematic
 s and English from the University of Düsseldorf and a PhD in statistics f
 orm the University of Abertay\, Dundee.\n\nJanine Illian is the first auth
 or of a book recently published by Wiley that aims at providing an overvie
 w of the current state of the art of spatial point process methodology to 
 both a statistical and a non-specialists readership.  \n\nMost of Janine
 ’s work focuses on the interface between ecology and statistical modelli
 ng. Her main research interests include spatial statistics\, in particular
  spatial point process modelling\, functional data analysis approaches to 
 complex data problems\, multivariate methodology and assessing and measuri
 ng biodiversity.
LOCATION:Microsoft Research Ltd\, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road
 )\, Cambridge
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