Noel Cressie

Presentation

Dimension-Reduced Inference for Spatio-Temporal Changes of Arctic Sea Ice

Noel Cressie, Distinguished Professor and Director of Centre of Environmental Informatics. University of Wollongong, Australia

Arctic sea-ice extent has been of considerable interest to scientists in recent years, mainly due to its decreasing trend over the past 20 years. In this talk, I propose a hierarchical spatio-temporal generalised linear model (GLM) for binary Arctic-sea-ice data, where data dependencies are introduced through a latent dynamic spatio-temporal linear mixed-effects model. A spatio-temporal model with dynamical random coefficients of spatial basis functions at its core, achieves both dimension reduction and nonstationarity for spatial fields at different time points. An EM algorithm is proposed to estimate model parameters, and a (empirical) hierarchical-statistical-modeling approach is used to obtain the predictive distribution of the latent spatio-temporal process. This approach is applied to spatial binary Arctic-sea-ice data for each September over the past 20 years, and several posterior summaries are computed in order to detect changes of Arctic-sea-ice cover. This is joint work with Dr Bohai Zhang of Nankai University, China.

Biography

Noel Cressie is the Director of the Centre for Environmental Informatics in the National Institute for Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) and Distinguished Professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Missouri and an Affiliate of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Cressie received his BSc (with First Class Honours) from the University of Western Australia and an MA and PhD in Statistics from Princeton University, USA. His past appointments have been at The Flinders University of South Australia, Iowa State University, and The Ohio State University. He has published in areas that include environmental statistics, statistics for remote sensing, empirical-Bayesian and Bayesian methods, and spatial and spatio-temporal statistics. Cressie has authored or co-authored four books; the latest one, “Spatio-Temporal Statistics with R,” was published last year in 2019. He is the recipient of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies’ 2009 R.A. Fisher Award, the Statistical Society of Australia’s 2014 Pitman Medal, the Royal Statistical Society’s 2016 Barnett Award, the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences’ 2017 Matheron Award, and the 2018 Moyal Medal. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the Spatial Econometrics Association; and he is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute.