To celebrate World Statistics Day 2015 AMSI and ACEMS are cohosting this lecture over the ACE Network.
How to get experts to reliably and completely encode what they know has for decades proven to be an elusive goal in knowledge management. An appealing approach for spatial problems is to immerse the expert in a realistic virtual environment and elicit information based on what they ‘see’. This information can then be translated to probabilistic statements and distributions that can be used as priors in Bayesian models.
We describe a pilot study in which the aim was to predict the presence of a threatened Australian animal, the rock wallaby, by augmenting the sparse observational data with spatial information obtained from expert ecologists.
The results suggest that the immersive approach provides a rich source of reliable prior information that can enhance statistical modelling and prediction.
About the speaker:
Kerrie Mengersen is a statistician whose research interests are in Bayesian and other modern methods for statistical modelling and computation. She currently holds a Chair in Statistics at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Professor Mengersen has maintained an active collaborative and consultancy profile in both the development of statistical methods and in their application to a wide variety of problems in environment, health and industry. She is a Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers, which aims for research excellence and its translation to collaborative domains in Healthy People, Sustainable Environments and Prosperous Societies. For the past decade Kerrie has led the Bayesian Research and Applications Group (BRAG) which aims to engage in world-class, relevant fundamental and collaborative statistical research, training and application through Bayesian and other modern methods. Professor Mengersen was announced as one of 15 new ARC Laureate Fellows for 2015 for her project, Bayesian Learning for Decision Making in the Big Data Era.
To participate in this seminar:
- Book your nearest ACE facility (find out here which universities have an ACE facility)
- Notify ag-dec@qut.edu.au that you will be joining the ACE seminar.
- No access to an ACE facility? Contact Maaike Wienk to arrange remote access (limited number of licences available- first come first serve).
