News

October 2023

• 

  Real-time modeling a step closer to reality

  1 min read · Thu, Oct 26 2023

  News

  An efficiency upgrade for an already fast approximation method enables accurate near-real-time modeling of complex systems and large datasets.

February 2023

• 

  Two-part joint models using INLA published in the Biometrical Journal

  1 min read · Mon, Feb 27 2023

  News

  Two-part joint models for a longitudinal semicontinuous biomarker and a terminal event have been recently introduced based on frequentist estimation. The biomarker distribution is decomposed into a probability of positive value and the expected value among positive values. Shared random effects can represent the association structure between the biomarker and the terminal event. The computational burden increases compared to standard joint models with a single regression model for the biomarker. In this context, the frequentist estimation implemented in the R package frailtypack can be
• 

  Prof. Sorbye and Dr. Moores visit the BayesComp group

  1 min read · Tue, Feb 21 2023

  News

  Dr. Matt Moores from the University of Wollongong in Australia and Prof. Sigrunn Sorbye from the Arctic University of Norway, are visiting the BayesComp group to continue collaborative projects.

January 2023

• 

  INLAjoint at SFB-JJC in Rennes

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Dr. Denis Rustand presented a talk on using INLA and INLAjoint for research in biometrics at the SFB-JJC: Young Researchers Day in Biometrics of the French Society of Biometrics, on 19 January 2023 in Rennes.
• 

  INLA for interval-censored data

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  A book chapter based on the use of INLA for efficient Bayesian modeling of interval-censored survival and reliability data has been published in the book Emerging Topics in Modeling Interval-Censored Survival Data published by Springer. This shows practitioners how to apply the INLA framework to produce insights into their data.
• 

  INLA for HPC

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Members of the BayesComp group together with collaborators from UCI developed parallelization strategies for the methodology of integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA). The approach makes use of nested thread-level parallelism, a parallel line search procedure using robust regression in INLA’s optimization phase and the state-of-the-art sparse linear solver PARDISO. This provides a way to flexibly utilize the power of today’s multi-core architectures. The work is integrated in the current version of the open-source R-INLA package, making its improved performance conveniently available
• 

  INLA course at UPNA

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Elias Krainski presented a course on Bayesian spatial and spatio-temporal modeling with R-INLA at the Public University of Navarre (UPNA) in Pamplona, Spain during 25-27 January 2023.
• 

  INLA workshop at University of Glasgow

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Elias Krainski presented a workshop for INLA users and developers titled "INLA: past, present and future" at the University of Glasgow during 18-19 January.

August 2022

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  KAUST Ph.D. candidate wins ISBA-BayesComp poster award at the International Society for Bayesian Analysis 2022

  1 min read · Sun, Aug 21 2022

  News

  Bayesian computational statistics

  Esmail Abdul Fattah, a KAUST Ph.D. candidate in statistics, won a poster award in the "junior-BayesComp-ISBA" category at the 30th meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA 2022) held from June 26 to July 1 in Montreal, Canada.

June 2022

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  INLA course at Bordeaux population health center

  1 min read · Wed, Jun 15 2022

  News

  Some members of the INLA team presented an INLA short course to the Biostatistics group at the Bordeaux population health center of INSERM and the University of Bordeaux. The content was tailored for biostatistics and public health applications, to avail INLA as a tool for fast Bayesian inference of applicable statistical models.

March 2021

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  Rue honored by Royal Statistical Society

  1 min read · Wed, Mar 3 2021

  Spotlight News

  ​KAUST Professor of Statistics Håvard Rue has been honored by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) for his "substantial and significant contributions in the area of efficient and scalable computational techniques for the data analysts' toolbox."

December 2020

• 

  KAUST researchers rank in top 1% of cited work worldwide

  1 min read · Wed, Dec 23 2020

  News

  Fifteen KAUST faculty members and one postdoctoral researcher rank among the 2020 Highly Cited Researchers from around the world, according to Clarivate Web of Science Group, a global leader of academic research analytics. The list names individuals whose work accounts for the top 1% of research cited worldwide.

October 2020

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  Today we celebrate World Statistics Day!

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 20 2020

  News

  statistics healthcare

  Let’s discover the world of the statisticians at KAUST and be ready to be amazed by their cutting-edge research!
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue presents at Advancing knowledge about spatial modeling, infectious diseases, environment and health 2020

  1 min read · Mon, Oct 5 2020

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was invited as a keynote speaker to the "Advancing knowledge about spatial modeling, infectious diseases, environment and health" virtual workshop organized by the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, during June 2020.
• 

  Prof. Rue and Dr. van Niekerk present R-INLA workshop at ICoMCoS2020

  1 min read · Mon, Oct 5 2020

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was invited as a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Mathematics, Computational Sciences, and Statistics (ICoMCoS) 2020, organized by Universitas Airlangga in Indonesia during 29-30 September. Together with Dr. Janet van Niekerk, they presented a virtual workshop on R-INLA and its applications.

January 2020

• 

  Prof. Rue at CMStatistics, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College

  1 min read · Sun, Jan 5 2020

  News

  Prof. Rue is in London for a few days in December for the 12th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics 2019), and a visit to research collaborators at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, as well as some collaborators at Imperial College.

November 2019

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  Prof. Haavard Rue is one of the World's most highly cited researchers

  1 min read · Mon, Nov 25 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue has been acknowledged as one of the World's most highly cited researchers on the Highly Cited Researchers 2019 list from the Web of Science Group.
• 

  Visiting researchers of the BayesComp group

  1 min read · Thu, Nov 7 2019

  News

  Dr. Anna Freni-Sterrantino from Imperial College in London is visiting during 2-23 November, Dr. Fatima Batool from University College in Lis visiting during 16-26 November and Dr. Erica Ponzi from the University of Oslo in Norway is visiting during 9-23 November. The BayesComp group is excited to (further) collaborate with these visiting researchers.

October 2019

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  Dr. Haakon Bakka presents at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate

  1 min read · Mon, Oct 7 2019

  News

  Dr. Haakon Bakka gave a presentation at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate on 25 September 2019, on the research performed at KAUST with Prof. Luigi Lombardo and Prof. Raphael Huser on Landslide modelling using R-INLA.
• 

  3 Faculty Positions in Statistics 2020 at KAUST

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 1 2019

  News

  statistics

  The 3 faculty positions are in the Statistics Program (http://stat.kaust.edu.sa) within the Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering Division. Currently, the Statistics Program has 7 core faculty and 10 affiliated faculty. We are primarily interested in applicants with strong background in one of the following areas: (1) Statistical Data Science and AI, including network data analysis and high-dimensional statistics (https://apply.interfolio.com/69165); (2) Statistical Climatology, with expertise in statistical analysis of climate model output data, in particular regional climate models, and in physical systems (https://apply.interfolio.com/69167); (3) Statistics for Public Health, including smart health data analysis, personalized medicine, and disease mapping (https://apply.interfolio.com/69168).

September 2019

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  Prof. Haavard Rue visits OsloMet

  1 min read · Tue, Sep 24 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue presented a seminar at OsloMet's Artificial Intelligence Group on 23 September. He also continued some existing collaboration.
• 

  Dr. Janet van Niekerk presents at the International Symposium in Computational and Methodological Statistics and Biostatistics in South Africa

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Dr. Janet van Niekerk presented a talk on complex survival models in the International Symposium in Computational and Methodological Statistics and Biostatistics in July 2019 at the University of Pretoria. She also collaborated on existing and new projects with collaborators from South Africa and North Carolina.
• 

  BayesComp members at the IWSM 2019 in Guimaraes, Portugal

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue, Dr. Haakon Bakka and Dr. Janet van Niekerk attended and presented at the International Workshop on Statistical Modelling in July 2019. This workshop brings together experts and young researchers to discuss and collaborate on challenges in statistical modelling.
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue examines PhD at Oxford University

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was at Oxford in May 2019 for a research visit and to examine a PhD thesis of one of Prof. Chris Holmes’ students.
• 

  BayesComp visiting student Maria Bondareva

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  The BayesComp group hosted visiting student Maria Bondareva through the VSRP program from January to June 2019. She worked on projects concerning survival models and joint models and developed some vignettes for survival analysis in R.
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue visits Carlos III University of Madrid

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue visited the Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain during May 2019 to give a seminar at the Department of Statistics and to collaborate on ongoing projects.
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue presents at the Swiss Numerics Day 2019

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was an invited speaker at the Swiss Numerics Day 2019 meeting in May 2019 at USI Lugano, Switzerland. He contributed to this meeting with a talk about the role and importance of sparse matrices in statistics. He also collaborated with Prof Olaf Schenk, which is the brain behind the PARDISO sparse matrix library in R, and others.
• 

  BayesComp members present space-time seminar in Cape Town

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Haakon Bakka presented a seminar on spatio-temporal modeling at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in June 2019.
• 

  BayesComp group present INLA course in South Africa

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue, Dr. Haakon Bakka and Dr. Janet van Niekerk presented a four day long INLA training course at the University of South Africa in Florida, Johannesburg during June 2019. The course was designed to impact young staff and PhD students from previously disadvantaged universities in South Africa. The audience gained a lot of skills during this course and the course was very well received.
• 

  BayesComp members at O'Bayes 2019

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Haakon Bakka attended the O'Bayes 2019 conference at University of Warwick, with about 100 participants. Our work were very well recieved [ https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/obayes-19-1-snapshots/], and the concept of Penalized complexity priors seems to be accepted in the community. Dr. Haakon Bakka presented a poster and Prof. Haavard Rue delivered one of the invited talks.
• 

  BayesComp members present in the European Course in Advanced Statistics on Statistical Analysis for Space-Time Data (ECAS2019)

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Haakon Bakka presented a part of the European Course in Advanced Statistics on Statistical Analysis for Space-Time Data (ECAS2019), organized by the Portuguese Statistical Society (SPE) and the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operational Research (SEIO). The course took place in Lisbon, Portugal, on July 15th-17th, 2019. The ECAS courses are intended to achieve postgraduate training in special areas of statistics for (especially 1st year) PhD students, researchers, teachers at universities, and professionals interested in the application of new statistical methods
• 

  Dr. Haakon Bakka's research visit to Zurich

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Haakon went to the University of Zurich for two weeks in May 2019 to collaborate with Malgorzata Roos on "Sensitivity and identification quantification by a relative latent model complexity perturbation in the Bayesian meta-analysis" Also in Zurich, Haakon gave a talk at ETH titled "Fundamental ideas of the stochastic partial differential equations approach to defining random effects".
• 

  BayesComp members at the ISI's WSC 2019 in Kuala Lumpur

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue, Dr. Haakon Bakka and Dr. Janet van Niekerk attended the 62 nd World Statistics Congress of the ISI in Kuala Lumpur on 18-23 August 2019 where they presented in invited and contributed paper sessions. This bi-annual meeting brings together major role players from academia, government offices and industry partners.

August 2019

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  R-INLA used to accurately predict forest fires in Portugal

  1 min read · Wed, Aug 28 2019

  News

  Professors Maria Antónia da Conceição Abrantes Amaral Turkman and Kamil Feridum Turkman, from the University of Lisbon used the INLA methodology and specifically SPDE's (using R-INLA), to do the official risk assessment for forest fire prediction in Portugal for 2018. The prediction s turned out to be very accurate and a new study is on the way for updating the predictions for 2020 with more detailed data.
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  BayesComp members at Valencia International Bayesian Analysis Summer School

  1 min read · Wed, Aug 28 2019

  News

  The Valencia International Bayesian Analysis Summer School, VIBASS3 was attended by four members of BayesComp. It was an opportunity to get access to the most up to date advances of this field, acquire more skills for PhD research, and to network with other professionals and experts. This school included sessions about Applied Bayesian Computation specifically the NIMBLE Platform for Hierarchical Modeling and MCMC that were presented by Daniel Turk, member of the NIMBLE Development Team. Also, an interesting talk about Bayesian modelling of environmental DNA data was presented by Eleni
• 

  BayesComp members at Data Science Summer School DS3 in France

  1 min read · Wed, Aug 28 2019

  News

  In June 2019, BayesComp members attended the Data Science Summer School DS3 that was held at École Polytechnique University in Paris. This event provided them with a series of courses and practical sessions covering the latest advances in the field of data science. Last two days were about Bayesian Statistics that cover the theory and practice of hyperparameter selection using Bayesian optimization, and Bayesian models for supervised learning, from Bayesian linear and logistic regression, to Gaussian processes.

June 2019

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  New paper accepted in JGR - Earth Surface

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 25 2019

  Spotlight News

  Statistics of extremes Bayesian Statistics

  New accepted paper: Lombardo, L., Bakka, H., Tanyas, H., van Westen, C., Mai, P. M., and Huser, R. (2019+), Geostatistical modeling to capture seismic-shaking patterns from earthquake-induced landslides, Journal of Geophysical Research-Earth Surface [ PDF preprint]
• 

  New paper accepted in JABES

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 25 2019

  Spotlight News

  extreme weather spatio-temporal statistics Statistics of extremes

  New accepted paper: Castro-Camilo, D., Huser, R., and Rue, H. (2019+), A spliced Gamma-generalized Pareto model for short-term extreme wind speed probabilistic forecasting, Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, to appear [ PDF preprint]

January 2019

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  KAUST students participate in Europe’s leading hackathon event

  1 min read · Thu, Jan 3 2019

  Awards

  Torsten Hädrich and Yan Gong, two KAUST Ph.D. students from the University's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering division, recently represented KAUST at the 48-hour international hackathon event Junction 2018. The event, which is Europe's most prestigious annual hackathon, brought computer and data scientists to Helsinki, Finland, from November 23 to 25, 2018, with the goal of addressing real-world computational issues while inspiring the next generation of technological leaders. Around 1,000 participants—including developers, designers and other "tech-heads" from 105

November 2018

• 

  2018 Workshop on Statistics and Data Science

  1 min read · Sat, Nov 10 2018

  News

  statistics data analysis

  The Statistics Program at KAUST is proud to host the 2018 Workshop on Statistics and Data Science. This workshop gathers the leading experts on statistical data science to discuss the current needs, challenges and opportunities of modeling massive and high dimensional data, predicting complex biological and physical processes. The workshop will run from November 12-14. Talks and posters presentations will take place in Auditorium 0215 (between Buildings 4 & 5). Details on the workshop (speakers, abstracts and schedule) can be found here.

September 2018

• Solving real-world problems

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 19 2018

  News

  statistics Bayesian computational statistics healthcare ecology

  A tool developed by Håvard Rue has transformed data analysis, interpretation and communication. It has been applied broadly: from modeling the spread of infectious diseases to mapping fish stocks.
• 

  How extreme weather exacerbates air pollution

  1 min read · Tue, Sep 4 2018

  News

  statistics extreme weather air pollution xstat research highlights

  Simultaneously modeling of air pollutants and weather under extreme conditions highlights the potential for serious health risks.

November 2017

• 

  2017 Workshop Modern Statistics for Complex Data Structures

  1 min read · Sun, Nov 12 2017

  Spotlight News

  statistics

  2017 Workshop Modern Statistics for Complex Data Structures