Statistics and Prob Seminar: Finn Lindgren

Finn Lindgren (University of Bath)

Title: The (un)reliability of contour curves

Abstract: Despite the ubiquitous use of contour plots for visualising estimated spatial fields, the uncertainty associated with such curves has been given a surprisingly small amount of attention. I'll present an approach that connects with the dual problem of estimating the uncertainty of excursion sets, leading to a more stringent formulation of the problem. Computational methods are constructed for practical use in geostatistics and medical imaging, that in particular can be applied to Gaussian Markov random fields, and used in combination with integrated nested Laplace approximations for efficient Bayesian inference.

References:

Bolin and Lindgren (2014), JRSSB: Excursion and contour uncertainty regions for latent Gaussian models (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rssb.12055/abstract)

Bolin and Lindgren, R package "excursions": http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/excursions/