Professor Christian Robert is a distinguished statistician and enthusiastic science communicator. His areas of expertise include Bayesian analysis with a focus on decision theory and model selection, numerical probability, with works cantering on the application of Markov chain theory to simulation, and computational statistics, developing and evaluating new methodologies for the analysis of statistical models.
Since 2000, he has been Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Université Paris-Dauphine. He is also a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and the former Head of the Statistics Laboratory of the Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique (CREST).
Professor Robert spoke at the 2012 Australian Statistical Conference in Adelaide, and then embarked on a lecture tour around Australia, giving eight seminars and two public lectures. His public lectures showed how computer simulation is used in statistics and gave applications ranging from Sudoku puzzles to the ancestral trees of Pygmy tribes.
Tour dates: 13 July – 21 August
Talks:
- AMSI Public Lecture: Simulation as a universal tool for statistics
- Rao-Blackwellisation of sampling schemes
- Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC): advances and limitations
- ABC methods for Bayesian model choice
