General - UHasselt

The Faculty of Science and the Center for Statistics of
Hasselt University invite you to the
Inaugural Lecture Francqui Chair

 

Professor Anthony Davison
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

 

Likelihood inference for a problem in particle physics

 

 

March 28, 2011 at 15:00
UHasselt, Building D
Lecture Hall H1

 

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator located at CERN, near Geneva, recently started operation after a long wait.  It is located in an underground tunnel 27km in circumference, and when fully operational, will be the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator. It is hoped that it will provide evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the last remaining particle of the so-called Standard Model of particle physics.  The quantity of data that will be generated by the LHC is roughly equivalent to that of the European telecommunications network, but this will be boiled down to just a few numbers.  After a brief introduction, this talk will outline elements of the statistical problem of detecting the presence of a particle, and then sketch how higher order likelihood asymptotics may be used for signal detection in this context.  The work is joint with Nicola Sartori, of the University of Padova.

The lecture is followed by a reception in the Winter Garden.

 

 

Four lectures on likelihood theory

 

Professor Anthony Davison, EPFL

 

Likelihood is central to modern statistics, from both frequentist and Bayesian viewpoints. These lectures for graduate students will survey topics in modern likelihood, including: a brief summary of classical results; model comparison by likelihood criteria; non-regular problems; conditional, marginal, restricted, composite likelihoods, etc.; useful approximations; higher-order asymptotics.

Teaching schedule:

March 29, 2011 (location: Hasselt University)
From 14:00 till 15:00 and from 15:30 till 16:30 at Building D, Room C110
March 31, 2011 (location: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
From 14:00 till 15:00 and from 15:30 till 16:30 at Department of Mathematics,
Celestijnenlaan 200B, Heverlee, Room 00.1

 

Four lectures on the statistics of extremes

 

Professor Anthony Davison, EPFL

 

Rare events can have catastrophic consequences, as shown by the recent floods in Pakistan and Australia, Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf oil spill or the problems in the financial markets. The probabilities of such events are modeled using probability models for tails of distributions, for which specialized statistical tools are becoming ever more important.  These lectures for graduate students will give an overview of the topic, including motivation, basic probability models and associated statistical methods, dependent and non-stationary data, regression modeling and multivariate extremes.

Teaching schedule:

May 4, 2011 (location: Université catholique de Louvain)
From 14:00 till 15:00 and from 15:30 till 16:30 at Institut de Statistique, Voie de Roman Pays 20, Louvain-la-Neuve, Room C115
May 5, 2011 (location: Hasselt University)
From 11:00 till 12:00 and from 14:00 till 15:00 at Building D, Room C110

 

 

Closing Lecture Francqui Chair

 

Professor Anthony Davison, EPFL

 

Statistical models for spatial extremes

 

May 5, 2011 at 15:30, UHasselt, Building D, Room C110

 

Rare environmental events are often spatial in extent and can be massively destructive, so it is important to model them well.  This talk will give an overview of approaches to such modeling, including Bayesian models, max-stable processes, and copula models, with an emphasis on general ideas rather than mathematical details, and with applications to environmental problems.