University of Warwick / EPSRC-CRiSM / ESRC National Centre
for Research Methods
RESEARCH WORKSHOP ON COMPOSITE LIKELIHOOD METHODS
April 15-17, 2008.
Meeting co-sponsored by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics, and by the Research Section of the Royal
Statistical Society
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Abstracts are invited now (deadline 25 January) for
contributed talks and posters at this workshop. For
details, and to pre-register for information bulletins on
the workshop, please see
http://go.warwick.ac.uk/complik2008
BACKGROUND
In many modern applications of statistical models, standard
likelihood-based inference meets difficulties caused by
high-dimensional interdependencies. Prominent application
areas include the analysis of multivariate longitudinal and
event-history data, spatial statistics, social network
analysis, and bioinformatics. The problems encountered
include prohibitively large computational demands (usually
arising from the need to calculate integrals in many
dimensions), and undue sensitivity to secondary modelling
assumptions.
Various alternative approaches based on modification of the
likelihood have been suggested in the research literature;
composite likelihoods are instances of this, and they have
been of rapidly increasing interest recently. Composite
likelihoods are pseudo-likelihoods constructed by pooling
likelihood components, with each component corresponding to
a marginal or conditional event. A prominent special case
is pairwise likelihood, based on components which are
marginal likelihoods for pairs of observations.
Confirmed speakers so far are D R Cox (Oxford), P Fearnhead
(Lancaster), N L Hjort (Oslo), H Joe (UBC), S Lele
(Alberta), K-Y Liang (Johns Hopkins), B G Lindsay (Penn
State), G Molenberghs (Hasselt), N Reid (Toronto), N
Shephard (Oxford), P Song (Waterloo), C Varin (Venice).
Participants in this workshop are welcome to take part also
in the first day (April 14) of the parallel BAYESIAN
ANALYSIS OF HIGH DIMENSIONAL DATA workshop,
http://go.warwick.ac.uk/bhdworkshop
The two workshops will, in addition, hold a combined poster
session and social event, in order to maximize the impact
of contributed posters.
It is likely that a small number of bursaries will be made
available to support participation in the workshop by PhD
students. Details will appear on the web page when full
registration opens.
|