I've received this as a member of another list.
It might be of interest to spatial-statistics experts.

Mike Titterington.




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From: Gregoire Dubois <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: Spatial Interpolation Comparison exercise: who is going to do the "best
map"?
Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 09:19:38 +0200
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Please, find hereafter the announcement for the following
international exercise. I would very much appreciate the contribution
of the community of connectionists.

SIC2004 is the second edition of a scientific exercise dedicated to
decision support systems and spatial statistics.

SIC2004 stands for Spatial Interpolation Comparison 2004. Participants
will receive a subset of an environmental data set (typically
measurements of an environmental variable + spatial coordinates of the
sampling places) and will have to estimate the values taken by the
variable at the remaining locations of the full data set. The true
values found at these locations will be made public only at the end of
the exercise. Various criteria will be used to assess the performances
of the interpolation algorithms (time of calculation, minimum errors,
etc.).

This edition will focus on automatic mapping algorithms: participants
to SIC2004 will have to prepare their algorithms before receiving the
data (only sampling locations will be given) and no interaction with
the algorithm will be allowed during the exercise.

Participants to SIC2004 will be invited to submit a manuscript at the
end of the exercise for publication in the online journal GIDA
(Geographic Information and Decision Analysis) as well as in a
European Report (hardcopy).

For more information, please visit the web site www.ai-geostats.org

Thank you very much for your attention,

Gregoire


Keywords: geostatistics,spatial statistics, neural networks,
spatial interpolation, GIS.


PS: in the case you would like to support such an exercise, could you
please
forward this information to other potential scientific communities (e.g.
machine
learning, neural networks, statisticians, etc.). Thank you very much.


__________________________________________
Gregoire Dubois (Ph.D.)
JRC - European Commission
Radioactivity Environmental Monitoring
TP 441, Via Fermi 1
21020 Ispra (VA)
ITALY

Tel. +39 (0)332 78 6360
Fax. +39 (0)332 78 5466
Email: [log in to unmask]
WWW: http://www.ai-geostats.org <http://www.ai-geostats.org/>
WWW: http://rem.jrc.cec.eu.int <http://rem.jrc.cec.eu.int/>


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===================================================================

D.M. Titterington,
Department of Statistics,
University of Glasgow,
Glasgow G12 8QQ,
Scotland, UK.

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Tel (44)-141-330-5022
Fax (44)-141-330-4814
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/~mike