Date/Time
Date(s) - 19/03/2024
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Location: KTH B105

 Date/Time: Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 3.30 – 4.30 p.m. (will bring refreshments to KTH B105) 

Speaker: Rishikesh Yadav (Postdoctoral Research Fellow – HEC Montréal, McGill University, McMaster University)

Title: Joint modeling of landslide counts and sizes using spatial marked point processes with sub-asymptotic mark distributions

Abstract: To accurately quantify landslide hazard in a region of Turkey, we develop new marked point process models within a Bayesian hierarchical framework for the joint prediction of landslide counts and sizes. We leverage mark distributions justified by extreme-value theory and specifically propose “sub asymptotic” distributions to flexibly model landslide sizes from low to high quantiles. The use of intrinsic conditional autoregressive priors and a customized adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm allow for fast, fully Bayesian inference. We show that sub-asymptotic mark distributions provide improved predictions of large landslide sizes, and our model is used for risk assessment and hazard mapping. Furthermore, within the general modeling framework, a sub-model known as the areal model is utilized when data are aggregated at a coarser slope unit resolution. We applied this framework to jointly model Wenchuan landslide counts and sizes data, highlighting the benefit of the joint modeling approach in the landslide literature for hazard and risk assessment.

Bio: Rishikesh Yadav is a postdoctoral research fellow at HEC Montréal and McGill University, working with Prof. Aurélie Labbe, Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal, Prof. Alexandra M. Schmidt, Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Occupational Health, McGill University, and Dr. Pratheepa Jeganathan, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University. He did his Ph.D. in 2022 in Statistics at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Prof. Raphaël Huser. Rishikesh’s Ph.D. thesis is “Bayesian Modeling of Sub-Asymptotic Spatial Extremes.” He obtained his Master’s (M.Sc.) in Mathematical Statistics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) in 2016 and a Bachelor of Mathematics and Statistics in 2014 from the University of Allahabad.