Department of Statistics Seminar
North Carolina State University

presents

Dr. George Christakos

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"The Citizen Kane Effect on Spatiotemporal Analysis and Mapping"

ABSTRACT

Many scientific disciplines rely heavily on spatiotemporal analysis and mapping techniques that can handle rigorously and efficiently applications of considerable practical importance. The BME approach of modern geostatistics concentrates on two levels of analysis: the ontology level (process of building models for natural systems), and the epistemology level (what we know about a system and how we integrate & process this knowledge). An analogy is then made between the BME approach and the narrative of the film "Citizen Kane" which accounts both for the facts and for the meaning behind the facts. BME integrates and process information from two major physical knowledge bases (KB): the general KB (obtained from scientific principles, physical laws, summary statistics, etc.) and the specificatory KB (obtained through experience with the specific situation). The approach develops logically plausible rules and standards for knowledge processing, allows considerable flexibility regarding the choice of appropriate spatiotemporal estimators and distribution laws (non-linear estimators, non-Gaussian laws, etc.), and offers a rigorous assessment of the mapping uncertainty (multi-point, integration pdf). Classical geostatistics is obtained as a special case of the considerably more general BME viewpoint. Furthermore, this viewpoint offers more accurate and informative results in practice by incorporating physical KB that cannot be processed by the classical methods.

Friday, October 01, 1999

3:35 - 4:35 pm

206 Cox Hall

Refreshments will be served on the second floor of Dabney Hall (left of Room 222) at 3:00 pm.