[Turing-Southampton] S3RI seminar: Richard Wilkinson, Thursday 2-3pm

[Ogden H.E.]

Dear all,

On Thursday (3 October) at 2pm in 54/10037 (10B), we have an S3RI seminar from Richard Wilkinson (University of Sheffield) on "What drives the glacial-interglacial cycle? A Bayesian approach to a long-standing model selection problem". Details are given below.

The seminar will also be available via a live web-cast at
https://southampton.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=94bcd93a-f6ca-4155-a9bf-aad800f34dc8

The talk will be followed by tea and cake in the staff reading room on level 4 of building 54.

All are welcome!

Best wishes,

Helen

What drives the glacial-interglacial cycle? A Bayesian approach to a long-standing model selection problem

Richard Wilkinson, University of Sheffield

The current ice age began approximately 3 Myr ago. Since then, the climate has fluctuated between glacial and inter-glacial periods, with the current inter-glacial period having lasted approximately 12 kyr. Scientists aim to understand the dynamics of this cycle using low-order oscillating dynamical models, which they drive using the known solar forcing. Many different studies have argued for the primacy of different aspects of the solar forcing, or for different dynamical systems models, by comparing data from ice-cores to (often hand-tuned) model predictions. Computational intractability has meant that heuristic arguments are usually used to argue for the superiority of a particular model or regime, rather than any form of principled statistical inference.

In this talk, I will describe how advances in Monte Carlo methodology allow us to give an answer to the long running debate about the impact of the solar forcing and whether it is possible to choose between models (given the paucity of the data) by estimating parameter posteriors and Bayes factors. In order to make this approach feasible, careful design of the proposal distributions is necessary, and we describe Brownian bridge type proposals that are successful in this setting.


For the current schedule of S3RI seminars, see https://tinyurl.com/s3riseminar<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2Fs3riseminar&data=01%7C01%7C%7C0f4212d4fced42125aaa08d745b56474%7C4a5378f929f44d3ebe89669d03ada9d8%7C0&sdata=I4zabPBzUDRvVl%2B8KuEQ16mY%2FsAbjbNASHj9i7RvvS8%3D&reserved=0>
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