SSES Workshop on Hierarchical Modeling in Environmental Statistics

The SSES Progam

Workshop on Hierarchical Modeling in Environmental Statistics (WHIES)
and
Short Course on Bayesian Hierarchical Statistics

in Columbus, OH, May 14-16, 2000

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Invited Speakers' Position Statements

WHIES Position Paper


Workshop on Hierarchical Modeling in Environmental Statistics (WHIES) May 14-16, 2000, Fawcett Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
	This was a workshop jointly sponsored by The Ohio State University (OSU), ASA's Section for Statistics and the Environment (ENVR), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The goal of the workshop was to foster discussion within the environmental statistics community on the potential importance of hierarchical statistical modeling to solve the hard quantitative problems associated with environmental studies. Invited speakers had both national and international prominence in their areas, which included statistics for toxicology, ecology, disease risk, air and water quality, and climate and weather. Sessions were organized around these application areas. Cutting across such areas are statistical methodologies that are important to hierarchical modeling, such as exploratory data analysis, directed graphical models, empirical Bayes and fully Bayes methods, posterior summarization, and model diagnostics. There were several break-out discussion sessions, involving all workshop participants, to focus on current and emerging statistical methodologies for environmental statistics. Please see the final WHIES position paper for a summary of the discussion. A Contributed Poster Session was scheduled for Monday May 15, 6.00 - 7.30pm, in conjunction with a cash bar and hors d'oevres. The Scientific Program Committee consisted of Mark Berliner (OSU), George Casella (Cornell), Noel Cressie (OSU; Chair), and Timothy Gregoire (Yale). The local arrangements were made by the Program in Spatial Statistics and Environmental Sciences (SSES) in the Department of Statistics at The Ohio State University. The workshop was held at The Fawcett Center, an Ohio State University conference facility adjacent to campus, with excellent meeting space and hotel-style accommodation.

Short Course on Bayesian Hierarchical Statistics Sunday Morning, May 14, 2000, Fawcett Center, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
	A half-day short course, on Bayesian Hierarchical Statistics, preceded the Workshop. The instructors were Mark Berliner (OSU) and Christopher Wikle (U. Missouri). Participants were requested to have at least a Masters (or equivalent) degree in Statistics; no prior knowledge of Bayesian or hierarchical statistics was assumed. The Short Course topics included the motivation for hierarchical models, simple tutorial examples, implementation details, and multi-level hierarchical models for processes distributed in time, space, and space-time. Examples were taken from the environmental sciences. Course participants received handouts supplementing the topics covered.