Birgit Erni will present the Department of Statistical Science seminar with a talk entitled "Lagged Response and Timing of Events in Environmental Time Series".

Abstract: These are two topics I have come across when working with time series of pollen counts. Questions I am trying to answer are:

1. When did the pollen season start and can we find an interval estimate for this?
2. How to deal with lagged response for predicting daily pollen counts?

Keywords: calibration, inverse regression, splines, seasonality, distributed lag models (DLM), signal regression, ecological memory, stochastic antecedent model (SAM), functional data analysis (FDA)

Birgit Erni is a senior lecturer in the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town.  She is core member of the Centre for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation (SEEC).