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Register a new userWOMBAT: A fully Bayesian global flux-inversion framework
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WOMBAT (the WOllongong Methodology for Bayesian Assimilation of Trace-gases) is a fully Bayesian hierarchical statistical framework for flux inversion of trace gases from flask, in situ, and remotely sensed data. WOMBAT extends the conventional Bayesian-synthesis framework through the consideration of a correlated error term, the capacity for online bias correction, and the provision of uncertainty quantification on all unknowns that appear in the Bayesian statistical model. We show, in an observing system simulation experiment (OSSE), that these extensions are crucial when the data are indeed biased and have errors that are correlated. Using the GEOS-Chem atmospheric transport model, we show that WOMBAT is able to obtain posterior means and uncertainties on non-fossil-fuel CO$_2$ fluxes from Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) data that are comparable to those from the Model Intercomparison Project (MIP) reported in Crowell et al. (2019, Atmos. Chem. Phys., vol. 19). We also find that our predictions of out-of-sample retrievals from the Total Column Carbon Observing Network are, for the most part, more accurate than those made by the MIP participants. Subseque
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In recent years, much of the focus in monitoring child mortality has been on assessing changes in the under-five mortality rate (U5MR). However, as the U5MR decreases, the share of neonatal deaths (within the first month) tends to increase, warranting increased efforts in monitoring this indicator in addition to the U5MR. A Bayesian splines regression model is presented for estimating neonatal mortality rates (NMR) for all countries. In the model, the relationship between NMR and U5MR is assessed and used to inform estimates, and spline regression models are used to capture country-specific trends. As such, the resulting NMR estimates incorporate trends in overall child mortality while also capturing data-driven trends. The model is fitted to 195 countries using the database from the United Nations Interagency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, producing estimates from 1990, or earlier if data are available, until 2015. The results suggest that, above a U5MR of 34 deaths per 1000 live births, at the global level, a 1 per cent increase in the U5MR leads to a 0.6 per cent decrease in the ratio of NMR to U5MR. Below a U5MR of 34 deaths per 1000 live births, the proportion of deaths under-five that are neonatal is constant at around 54 per cent. However, the relationship between U5MR and NMR varies across countries. The model has now been adopted by the United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.
Storm surge, the onshore rush of sea water caused by the high winds and low pressure associated with a hurricane, can compound the effects of inland flooding caused by rainfall, leading to loss of property and loss of life for residents of coastal areas. Numerical ocean models are essential for creating storm surge forecasts for coastal areas. These models are driven primarily by the surface wind forcings. Currently, the gridded wind fields used by ocean models are specified by deterministic formulas that are based on the central pressure and location of the storm center. While these equations incorporate important physical knowledge about the structure of hurricane surface wind fields, they cannot always capture the asymmetric and dynamic nature of a hurricane. A new Bayesian multivariate spatial statistical modeling framework is introduced combining data with physical knowledge about the wind fields to improve the estimation of the wind vectors. Many spatial models assume the data follow a Gaussian distribution. However, this may be overly-restrictive for wind fields data which often display erratic behavior, such as sudden changes in time or space. In this paper we develop a semiparametric multivariate spatial model for these data. Our model builds on the stick-breaking prior, which is frequently used in Bayesian modeling to capture uncertainty in the parametric form of an outcome. The stick-breaking prior is extended to the spatial setting by assigning each location a different, unknown distribution, and smoothing the distributions in space with a series of kernel functions. This semiparametric spatial model is shown to improve prediction compared to usual Bayesian Kriging methods for the wind field of Hurricane Ivan.
Studying the determinants of adverse pregnancy outcomes like stillbirth and preterm birth is of considerable interest in epidemiology. Understanding the role of both individual and community risk factors for these outcomes is crucial for planning appropriate clinical and public health interventions. With this goal, we develop geospatial mixed effects logistic regression models for adverse pregnancy outcomes. Our models account for both spatial autocorrelation and heterogeneity between neighborhoods. To mitigate the low incidence of stillbirth and preterm births in our data, we explore using class rebalancing techniques to improve predictive power. To assess the informative value of the covariates in our models, we use posterior distributions of their coefficients to gauge how well they can be distinguished from zero. As a case study, we model stillbirth and preterm birth in the city of Philadelphia, incorporating both patient-level data from electronic health records (EHR) data and publicly available neighborhood data at the census tract level. We find that patient-level features like self-identified race and ethnicity were highly informative for both outcomes. Neighborhood-level factors were also informative, with poverty important for stillbirth and crime important for preterm birth. Finally, we identify the neighborhoods in Philadelphia at highest risk of stillbirth and preterm birth.
HATSouth is the worlds first network of automated and homogeneous telescopes that is capable of year-round 24-hour monitoring of positions over an entire hemisphere of the sky. The primary scientific goal of the network is to discover and characterize a large number of transiting extrasolar planets, reaching out to long periods and down to small planetary radii. HATSouth achieves this by monitoring extended areas on the sky, deriving high precision light curves for a large number of stars, searching for the signature of planetary transits, and confirming planetary candidates with larger telescopes. HATSouth employs 6 telescope units spread over 3 locations with large longitude separation in the southern hemisphere (Las Campanas Observatory, Chile; HESS site, Namibia; Siding Spring Observatory, Australia). Each of the HATSouth units holds four 0.18m diameter f/2.8 focal ratio telescope tubes on a common mount producing an 8.2x8.2 arcdeg field, imaged using four 4Kx4K CCD cameras and Sloan r filters, to give a pixel scale of 3.7 arcsec/pixel. The HATSouth network is capable of continuously monitoring 128 square arc-degrees. We present the technical details of the network, summarize operations, and present weather statistics for the 3 sites. On average each of the 6 HATSouth units has conducted observations on ~500 nights over a 2-year time period, yielding a total of more than 1million science frames at 4 minute integration time, and observing ~10.65 hours per day on average. We describe the scheme of our data transfer and reduction from raw pixel images to trend-filtered light curves and transiting planet candidates. Photometric precision reaches ~6 mmag at 4-minute cadence for the brightest non-saturated stars at r~10.5. We present detailed transit recovery simulations to determine the expected yield of transiting planets from HATSouth. (abridged)
In epidemiological modelling, the instantaneous reproduction number, $R_t$, is important to understand the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases. Current $R_t$ estimates often suffer from problems such as lagging, averaging and uncertainties demoting the usefulness of $R_t$. To address these problems, we propose a new method in the framework of sequential Bayesian inference where a Data Assimilation approach is taken for $R_t$ estimation, resulting in the state-of-the-art DAR$_t$ system for $R_t$ estimation. With DAR$_t$, the problem of time misalignment caused by lagging observations is tackled by incorporating observation delays into the joint inference of infections and $R_t$; the drawback of averaging is improved by instantaneous updating upon new observations and a model selection mechanism capturing abrupt changes caused by interventions; the uncertainty is quantified and reduced by employing Bayesian smoothing. We validate the performance of DAR$_t$ through simulations and demonstrate its power in revealing the transmission dynamics of COVID-19.
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