Evaluating Epidemic and Invasive Species Response to Forcing from Multivariate Spatio-Temporal Response Operators

• Activity Number: 268
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Christopher K. Wikle*+
• Companies: University of Missouri

Abstract

Epidemics and invasions are both characterized by nonlinear interactions across space and time. Dynamical spatio-temporal statistical models provide a useful framework to describe such processes in the presence of uncertainty, but these models are quite expensive. Here, we investigate whether the system dynamical response to weak forcing can produce useful characterizations of real-world dynamics for epidemics and invasions. This work borrows from notions in geophysical science and is based on fairly simple models that have a rich background in theory and and present interesting estimation and modeling challenges.