---------------------------- REMINDER 

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ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY



JOINT MEETING of COMPUTING SECTION, SHEFFIELD LOCAL GROUP and 

GENERAL APPLICATIONS SECTION





Wednesday 15th March 2006, 2:00pm - 4:30pm at Sheffield University (Tea 

3:25pm)



Lecture room 7, Hicks Building (1st floor/floor E), Hounsfield Road, S3 

7RH







COMPUTERISED SPATIAL STATISTICS







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Speakers and abstracts





(1) Spatio-temporal modelling of zooplankton in the North Atlantic



S.N. WOOD, W. HORBELT, D.C. SPEIRS, M.R. HEATH and W.S.C. GURNEY

(University of Bath)



Calanus finmarchicus is the dominant zooplankton species over much of the 

North Atlantic. It has an unusual life-cycle involving overwintering in 

very deep waters at very cold temperatures and then re-ascending to breed 

in the spring. Because of the considerable distances that individual 

calanus are transported during their lives, calanus population dynamics 

can only be properly understood at the scale of the whole North Atlantic. 

This involves the formulation of physically driven spatially explicit 

population dynamic models describing the whole North Atlantic population. 

However, given the complexity of the calanus life-cycle, key model 

parameters can only be estimated by treating this complex model as a 

statistical model and fitting it to data on calanus abundance. This talk 

describes an approach to doing this, involving a (parallelized) hybrid of 

finite differencing and autodifferentiation to obtain derivatives of the 

model predictions w.r.t. the parameters, coupled with a modified 

Gauss-Newton fitting method.





(2) Computational methods in spatial epidemiology



V. GOMEZ-RUBIO and N. BEST

(Dept. of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College London)



The talk will describe some of the state-of-the-art models employed in 

spatial statistics and, specifically, in spatial epidemiology. A brief 

introduction on how WinBugs can be used to fit spatial models and 

associated computational challenges will be given. This will be followed 

by a description of how GeoBugs can help with the definition of the 

spatial models and with the display of results in a map.  Finally, we will 



show how WinBugs can be linked to the R statistical language for initial 

data management or representation and exploitation of WinBUGS results by 

R’s enhanced plotting capabilities. This part will include descriptions of 



recent packages developed by the R user community.





(3) Adaptive sampling for automated soil mapping



B. MARCHANT

(Rothamsted Research, Harpenden)



A major problem for management of within-field variation is obtaining 

adequate information on the variations of important variables at 

acceptable cost. If soil properties are to be mapped with adequate 

precision, then the sampling intensity needed will differ between fields. 

Therefore farmers and agronomists run the risk of completing a survey then 



finding that they have substantially over-sampled and so wasted effort, or 



that they are not able to produce a reasonable map from the data because 

they are too sparse. In this talk we describe the development of adaptive 

methods for designing sample schemes which are suited to the property 

being measured when we start with little or no information on the spatial 

variability of the variable.







All welcome. 



Further information from Nick Fieller (email [log in to unmask], 



tel. 0114 222 3831).



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Sabine Landau

Dept of Biostatistics & Computing, PO Box 20

Institute of Psychiatry, KCL

De Crespigny Park

London SE5 8AF, UK