Place: Room 420, GP South (Building 78)
Time: Thursday 29th
May 2008 , 10:30 morning Tea, 11:00am seminar
Speaker: Professor Daniel
Kaplan, Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota,
USA.
Title: Untangling causation in complex
systems
Abstract: For many people, statistics is about simplifying
systems so that some standard test (e.g., the t-test) can be applied.
Over the last decade, new approaches to doing statistics have emerged that
can respect the intrinsic complexity of systems. I'll introduce a couple of
these approaches that focus on networks of influences: multiple regression
with large numbers of explanatory variables and the topological analysis of
causal networks. You don't need to know much about conventional statistics
to be able to follow the talk.
Biography: Danny Kaplan is visiting UQ
from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA where he is the DeWitt
Wallace Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. His training is in
physics, economics, and biomedical engineering. His research has involved
developing methods grounded in
nonlinear dynamics to the analysis of signals
from physiological systems. He is the author of the textbooks "Understanding
Nonlinear Dynamics" (with Leon Glass) and "Introduction to Scientific
Computation and Programming." Currently he is working on a textbook that
departs radically from the way statistics is usually introduced in university
in order to prepare students to use the methods that are the subject of the
talk.
Dr. Ariel Liebman
Research Fellow
ARC Centre for Complex Systems
School of ITEE, University of Queensland
email: a.liebman@uq.edu.au
tel: 
+61-7-3365-1623
mobile: +61-(0)414-226-336
room: 78-414, GP South, St Lucia Campus
web: www.accs.edu.au
May 26, 2008
