Event Details

You are kindly invited to the statistics seminar. We will host a talk by Dr. Edward Cripps for the University of Western Australia.

Title: Statistical modelling of daily rainfall across the continent of Australia 1876-2015

Abstract: Analysing over 294 million daily rainfall measurements since 1876, spanning 17,606 sites across continental Australia, this data set is large and complex. The continent spans arid, temperate and tropical weather zones, with a time span that could be considered sufficient to infer climate. Two thirds of the measurements are identically zero. However, many sites have exhibited more than 400mm on a given day with flooding a persistent threat. The consequence is that data is "extreme" at both tails, and the question remains open about how best to incorporate a fully probabilistic model to capture such phenomenon. A Bayesian hierarchical mixture model is presented that accommodates mixed discrete-continuous data that captures zero rainfall and right skewed positive data. Site specific temporal dependencies are model at the observational level via a mixture-of-experts, and the next level of the hierarchy embeds spatial variability by allocating to the mixture weights’ parameters a spatial Gaussian process. Computing and feasibility of inference are discussed. Acknowledging there are many other techniques to respond to such a rich data set, the seminar hopes to provoke a lively debate.