Presentation

The research activities of the Institute cover a large number of fields.  A major part of the activities are centered on mathematical statistics (semi and non-parametric statistics, bayesian statistics, multivariate analysis, regression estimation, mixture models, survival analysis, time series, ...) with important implications in various fields of application (econometrics, biostatistics, insurance, industrial statistics, transportation problems, ...).

Since January 2002, the Institute has been the coordinator of a IAP network :
"Statistical techniques and modelling for complex substantive questions with complex data" (2002-2006),
"Statistical analysis of association and dependence in complex data" (2007-2001).
The second research network contains 4 Belgian universities : Université catholique de Louvain, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Universiteit Hasselt, Universiteit Gent and,  4 European partners : Université Joseph Fourier (France), Universiteit Utrecht (The Netherlands), Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (UK).

In the field of teaching, the activity of the Institute is as follow :

• basic education
• second cycle education
• third cycle education

Concerning the first and second cycles studies, the Institute is responsible for the organisation of probability and statistics courses offered at the university.
In particular, it is responsible to organize and harmonize the basic statistics courses.  Moreover, since 2005, the study program of the Institute of statistics contains a minor in statistics eligible for students of all disciplines where statistics appears as an interesting complementary school.

At the graduate level, the Institute organises two masters :

• The master in statistics-general orientation, which proposes an introduction to the fundamental concepts of statistics and a large spectrum of methods of data analysis
• The master in statistics-orientation bio-statistics- which proposes a study program in statistics for students who want to apply this discipline in the medical sciences, and a particular in clinical and pre-clinical research, pharmaceutical research, epidemiology, public health or other areas in the medical sciences.

Since the academic year 2006-2007, the Ph.D. program is organized in the framework of the Doctoral School "STAT-Statistics and Actuarial Sciences", recognized by the FNRS.

The Institute offers consulting services to researchers using statistics in their profession.  This service includes discussions on statistical problems encountered by researchers working at other departments or laboratories of the Université catholique de Louvain.  Consulting services are also offered to business cooperations searching for support in dealing with statistical questions.  Furthermore, service courses (continued education) are provided for interested groups.