STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM
Ben Shaby
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics
Penn State University
Spatial Extreme Value Analysis for Fire Risk Assessment
ABSTRACT
Wildfires have the potential to inflict huge losses of life, infrastructure, and habitat. I will describe two projects related to extreme fire risk in a particularly vulnerable region in California. In describing extreme fire conditions, the salient characteristic is that one or more relevant environmental variable is in the far tail of its distribution. One would like to understand the tail in order to make informed policy decisions regarding, for example, fire risk mitigation. One difficulty is that, by definition, few observations of rare events are available. Furthermore, extremes of environmental processes almost always manifest dependence in time, space, or both. Stochastic process models for analyzing such structures exist, but they are difficult to work with directly because they have intractable likelihoods. I will discuss alternative representations that build dependence in extremes using latent variables.
DATE: Wednesday, November 2, 2016
TIME: 4:00 pm
PLACE: Philip E. Austin Bldg., Rm. 105
Coffee will be served at 3:30 pm in the Noether Lounge (AUST 326)
For more information, contact: Tracy Burke at tracy.burke@uconn.edu