Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The context of our work is the analysis of structured stochastic models with statistical tools. The idea underlying the concept of structure is that stochastic systems that exhibit great complexity can be accounted for by combining simple local assumptions in a coherent way. This provides a key to modelling, computation, inference and interpretation. This approach appears to be useful in a number of high impact applications including signal and image processing, neuroscience, genomics, sensors networks, etc. while the needs from these domains can in turn generate interesting theoretical developments. However, this powerful and flexible approach can still be restricted by necessary simplifying assumptions and several generic sources of complexity in data.

Often data exhibit complex dependence structures, having to do for example with repeated measurements on individual items, or natural grouping of individual observations due to the method of sampling, spatial or temporal association, family relationship, and so on. Other sources of complexity are related to the measurement process, such as having multiple measuring instruments or simulations generating high dimensional and heterogeneous data or such that data are dropped out or missing. Such complications in data-generating processes raise a number of challenges. Our goal is to contribute to statistical modelling by offering theoretical concepts and computational tools to handle properly some of these issues that are frequent in modern data. So doing, we aim at developing innovative techniques for high scientific, societal, economic impact applications and in particular via image processing and spatial data analysis in environment, biology and medicine.

The methods we focus on involve mixture models, Markov models, and more generally hidden structure models identified by stochastic algorithms on one hand, and semi and non-parametric methods on the other hand.

Hidden structure models are useful for taking into account heterogeneity in data. They concern many areas of statistics (finite mixture analysis, hidden Markov models, graphical models, random effect models, ...). Due to their missing data structure, they induce specific difficulties for both estimating the model parameters and assessing performance. The team focuses on research regarding both aspects. We design specific algorithms for estimating the parameters of missing structure models and we propose and study specific criteria for choosing the most relevant missing structure models in several contexts.

Semi and non-parametric methods are relevant and useful when no appropriate parametric model exists for the data under study either because of data complexity, or because information is missing. When observations are curves, they enable us to model the data without a discretization step. These techniques are also of great use for dimension reduction purposes. They enable dimension reduction of the functional or multivariate data with no assumptions on the observations distribution. Semi-parametric methods refer to methods that include both parametric and non-parametric aspects. Examples include the Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR) method which combines non-parametric regression techniques with parametric dimension reduction aspects. This is also the case in extreme value analysis, which is based on the modelling of distribution tails by both a functional part and a real parameter.