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Professor Sofia Olhede awarded "EPSRC Developing Leaders Funding" for project in Characterizing Interactions Across Large-Scale Point Process Populations

23 July 2013

Many ecological and other scientific datasets take the form of recorded events, such as time points of significant occurrences, or spatial locations of objects of interest. In statistical terms, such data represent point processes. The purpose of this research project is to study sets of interactions across multiple point processes, introducing novel statistical estimation methods for these interactions, with a specific focus on methods for applications at the forefront of ecology.

In ecological settings it is particularly important to model the interactions between multiple sets of point processes. Understanding an ecosystem requires models of how occurrences of multiple species interact spatially, potentially across several time instances. The current lack of theoretical understanding in this area is exacerbated by the sizes of modern datasets, which typically involve appreciable numbers and types of species, across multiple spatial scales, but also where many of the most important species are quite rare.