Villum Synergy grants to three MATH statisticians

Niels Richard Hansen (MATH) and Markus Jochum (NBI)
The objective of the project is to develop a novel framework - Causal INference for climate Change - CINCH - and use well-dated and synchronised ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica for the period of 60 to 20,000 years ago to test the following hypothesis:

With only the ice-core records of Greenland and Antarctic temperature proxies, the observed large-scale variability of CO2 can be reproduced, and the sources and sinks of the CO2 can be inferred.

Susanne Ditlevsen (MATH) and Peter Ditlevsen (NBI)
AMOC – Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – is a system of ocean currents that transports warm water to the North Atlantic and Europe and returns cooler water to warmer regions. It has two states – and therefore a tipping point. Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen aim to investigate the structure of this tipping point. If AMOC shifts state, it could have potentially enormous consequences, including a colder climate in Europe and even warmer conditions in the tropics.

They will apply newly developed statistical methods that “can capture the singular point where statistical linearization is no longer possible,” the grant recipients explain.

Carsten Wiuf (MATH) and Rasmus Heller (BIO)
Project: Using Graphical Models to Investigate Evolutionary Networks in Wild Cattle. Understanding how different species are connected in reticulated evolutionary networks is of fundamental interest in Biology. However, currently available methods to infer evolutionary relationships are based on simplified bifurcating models of species and population divergence.

Wiuf and Heller propose to develop a new type of Admixture Graph Model to disentangle the evolutionary network of wild and domestic cattle, with a special emphasis on detecting selection acting on genes that have crossed species boundaries. This will help us understand fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process, in particular speciation.