Latent Gaussian Models im Zürich [day 2]

The second day at the Latent Gaussian Models workshop in Zürich was equally interesting. Among the morning talks, let me mention Daniel Bové who gave a talk connected with the hyper-g prior paper he wrote with Leo Held (commented in an earlier post) and the duo of Janine Illian and Daniel Simpson who gave enthusiastic arguments as to why point pattern datasets should be analysed in a completely novel way, using partial SDEs. And showed us how this could be done via INLA. This perspective (purposedly?) contrasted with the modelling assumptions of Alan Gelfand who concluded the meeting with a highly interesting modelling/estimation of species distribution in the Cape area. He also ran a comparison with the Maxent approach to the same problem. As for my own talk, I somehow spent too much time on the introduction to ABC, trying to link the method with non-parametric perspectives, and so ended rushing through the sufficiency part and the population genetic results obtained by Jean-Marie Cornuet and Jean-Michel Marin the previous day. (The updated slides are available on slideshare.) I hope the main message was still spelled out clearly enough… In conclusion, this was a very interesting workshop, maybe the first of a kind since there is a possible follow-up next year in Trondheim. It showed the clear emergence of a very active INLA community, able to tackle old and new problems using this new technology, and illustrated once again the importance of developing user-friendly codes for promoting such technologies.