Gilbert Ritschard

Last updated

Gilbert Ritschard
Gilbert Ritschard.jpg
Gilbert Ritschard
Born (1950-03-24) March 24, 1950 (age 73)
NationalitySwiss
Alma mater University of Geneva
Known forContributions to sequence analysis and in particular the development of the TraMineR sequence-analysis toolkit.
SpouseChristiane (Comte) Ritschard
Scientific career
Fields Quantitative research, Statistics, Sequence analysis
Institutions University of Geneva
Doctoral advisor Emilio Fontela
Other academic advisorsLuigi Solari, Edouard Rossier

Gilbert Ritschard (born March 24, 1950) is a Swiss statistician specialized in quantitative methods for the social sciences and in the analysis of longitudinal data describing life courses. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Geneva. He earned a Ph.D. in Econometrics and Statistics at the University of Geneva in 1979. His main contributions are in sequence analysis. He initiated and led the SNFS project that developed the TraMineR R toolkit for sequence analysis. [1] He is one of the founders of the Sequence Analysis Association, which he served as first president.

Contents

Scholarly career

Gilbert Ritschard graduated in 1973 in quantitative economics, earned a diploma in Econometrics in 1975, and his Ph.D in Econometrics and Statistics in 1979, all at the Department of Econometrics of the University of Geneva. In his doctoral dissertation titled (in French) Contribution à l'analyse des structures qualitatives des modèles économiques [Contributions to the analysis of the qualitative structures of economic models], he developed powerful algorithms for solving qualitative systems of linear equations, i.e., systems where only the sign of the coefficients are known. [2] Such qualitative systems (introduced by Paul Samuelson in his Foundations of Economic Analysis) [3] are of special interest in comparative static analysis. [4] [5] During his time as a student, he served as teaching and research assistant at the Department of Econometrics.

After his Ph.D, Gilbert Ritschard worked during a few months at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) where he participated at the development of a large-scale economic model (see thesis [2] back cover.) He then spent one year as professor at the Department of Economics of the Université du Québec à Montréal before returning to Geneva as maître-assistant [assistant professor] in statistics. In 1986 he was nominated as associate professor of quantitative methods for the social sciences and was promoted as full professor in 1994. Gilbert Ritschard taught as visiting professor in Fribourg, Lausanne, Toronto, and Lyon (Ritschard's CV.) He was one of the promoters of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research LIVES: Overcoming vulnerability, a Life Course Perspective where he led the quantitative group from 2011 to 2018.

Along his career, his research interest first moved from econometrics and mathematical economics to social statistics, data mining and machine learning, and later to demography and life course analysis. A continuous salient characteristic of Gilbert Ritschard's research is interdisciplinarity as shown by his multiple collaborations with, among others, computer scientists, demographers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists.

Selected scholarly works:

Related Research Articles

A case study is an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case within a real-world context. For example, case studies in medicine may focus on an individual patient or ailment; case studies in business might cover a particular firm's strategy or a broader market; similarly, case studies in politics can range from a narrow happening over time like the operations of a specific political campaign, to an enormous undertaking like world war, or more often the policy analysis of real-world problems affecting multiple stakeholders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qualitative research</span> Form of research

Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantitative research</span> All procedures for the numerical representation of empirical facts

Quantitative research is a research strategy that focuses on quantifying the collection and analysis of data. It is formed from a deductive approach where emphasis is placed on the testing of theory, shaped by empiricist and positivist philosophies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cliometrics</span> Application of econometrics and other formal methods to the study of history

Cliometrics, sometimes called 'new economic history' or 'econometric history', is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history. It is a quantitative approach to economic history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Methodology</span> Study of research methods

In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bringing about a certain goal, like acquiring knowledge or verifying knowledge claims. This normally involves various steps, like choosing a sample, collecting data from this sample, and interpreting the data. The study of methods concerns a detailed description and analysis of these processes. It includes evaluative aspects by comparing different methods. This way, it is assessed what advantages and disadvantages they have and for what research goals they may be used. These descriptions and evaluations depend on philosophical background assumptions. Examples are how to conceptualize the studied phenomena and what constitutes evidence for or against them. When understood in the widest sense, methodology also includes the discussion of these more abstract issues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic model</span> Simplified representation of economic reality

An economic model is a theoretical construct representing economic processes by a set of variables and a set of logical and/or quantitative relationships between them. The economic model is a simplified, often mathematical, framework designed to illustrate complex processes. Frequently, economic models posit structural parameters. A model may have various exogenous variables, and those variables may change to create various responses by economic variables. Methodological uses of models include investigation, theorizing, and fitting theories to the world.

In social sciences and other domains, representative sequences are whole sequences that best characterize or summarize a set of sequences. In bioinformatics, representative sequences also designate substrings of a sequence that characterize the sequence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trygve Haavelmo</span> Norwegian economist and econometrician

Trygve Magnus Haavelmo, born in Skedsmo, Norway, was an economist whose research interests centered on econometrics. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1989.

In social sciences, especially economics, a stylized fact is a simplified presentation of an empirical finding. Stylized facts are broad tendencies that aim to summarize the data, offering essential truths while ignoring individual details.

Christian Gouriéroux is an econometrician who holds a Doctor of Philosophy in mathematics from the University of Rouen. He has the Professor exceptional level title from France. Gouriéroux is now a professor at University of Toronto and CREST, Paris [Center for Research in Economics and Statistics].

Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) is a decision tree technique based on adjusted significance testing. The technique was developed in South Africa and was published in 1980 by Gordon V. Kass, who had completed a PhD thesis on this topic. CHAID can be used for prediction as well as classification, and for detection of interaction between variables. CHAID is based on a formal extension of AID and THAID procedures of the 1960s and 1970s, which in turn were extensions of earlier research, including that performed by Belson in the UK in the 1950s. A history of earlier supervised tree methods together with a detailed description of the original CHAID algorithm and the exhaustive CHAID extension by Biggs, De Ville, and Suen, can be found in Ritschard.

Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research is an influential 1994 book written by Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba that lays out guidelines for conducting qualitative research. The central thesis of the book is that qualitative and quantitative research share the same "logic of inference." The book primarily applies lessons from regression-oriented analysis to qualitative research, arguing that the same logics of causal inference can be used in both types of research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Griffith C. Evans</span> American mathematician

Griffith Conrad Evans was a mathematician working for much of his career at the University of California, Berkeley. He is largely credited with elevating Berkeley's mathematics department to a top-tier research department, having recruited many notable mathematicians in the 1930s and 1940s.

The methodology of econometrics is the study of the range of differing approaches to undertaking econometric analysis.

John Denis Sargan, FBA was a British econometrician who specialized in the analysis of economic time-series.

Anil K. Bera is an Indian-American econometrician. He is Professor of Economics at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's Department of Economics. He is most noted for his work with Carlos Jarque on the Jarque–Bera test.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sequence analysis in social sciences</span>

In social sciences, sequence analysis (SA) is concerned with the analysis of sets of categorical sequences that typically describe longitudinal data. Analyzed sequences are encoded representations of, for example, individual life trajectories such as family formation, school to work transitions, working careers, but they may also describe daily or weekly time use or represent the evolution of observed or self-reported health, of political behaviors, or the development stages of organizations. Such sequences are chronologically ordered unlike words or DNA sequences for example.

Charles Frederick Roos was an American economist who made contributions to mathematical economics. He was one of the founders of the Econometric Society together with American economist Irving Fisher and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch in 1930. He served as Secretary-Treasurer during the first year of the Society and was elected as President in 1948. He was director of research of the Cowles Commission from September 1934 to January 1937.

Margaret E. Slade is Professor Emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and was a council member of the Royal Economic Society from 2004 to 2008. Slade is best known for her work on Industrial Economics, serving as the President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) from 2001 to 2003.

Raquel Fernández is an economist and currently the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Economics at New York University. She is also a fellow of the Econometric Society.

References

  1. 1 2 Gabadinho, Alexis; Ritschard, Gilbert; Müller, Nicolas S.; Studer, Matthias (2011). "Analyzing and Visualizing State Sequences in R with TraMineR". Journal of Statistical Software. 40 (4). doi: 10.18637/jss.v040.i04 . ISSN   1548-7660.
  2. 1 2 Ritschard, Gilbert (1980). Contribution à l'analyse des structures qualitatives des modèles économiques (Thesis). Berne: P. Lang. ISBN   326104750X.
  3. Samuelson, Paul Anthony (1983). Foundations of economic analysis. Harvard economic studies (Enlarged ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England: Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0-674-31303-3.
  4. Lancaster, Kelvin (1966). "The Solution of Qualitative Comparative Static Problems". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 80 (2): 278–295. doi:10.2307/1880693. JSTOR   1880693.
  5. Ritschard, Gilbert (1983). "Computable Qualitative Comparative Static Techniques". Econometrica. 51 (4): 1145–1168. doi:10.2307/1912056. JSTOR   1912056.
  6. Ritschard, G. (August 1, 1992). "The Fundamentals of Monotone Processes Reviewed Through an Inefficiency Measure". The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 107 (3): 1125–1136. doi:10.2307/2118379. ISSN   0033-5533. JSTOR   2118379.
  7. Ritschard, Gilbert; Antille, Gérard (1992). "A Robust Look at the Use of Regression Diagnostics". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series D (The Statistician). 41 (1): 41–53. doi:10.2307/2348635. ISSN   0039-0526. JSTOR   2348635.
  8. Kellerhals, Jean; Montandon, Cléopâtre; Ritschard, Gilbert; Sardi, Massimo; Montandon, Cleopatre (1992). "Le style éducatif des parents et l'estime de soi des adolescents". Revue Française de Sociologie. 33 (3): 313. doi:10.2307/3322266. JSTOR   3322266.
  9. Kellerhals, Jean; Montandon, Cléopâtre; Ritschard, Gilbert (1992). "Social status, types of family interaction and educational styles". European Journal of Sociology. 33 (2): 308–325. doi:10.1017/S0003975600006482. ISSN   0003-9756.
  10. Olszak, Michael; Ritschard, Gilbert (1995). "The Behaviour of Nominal and Ordinal Partial Association Measures". The Statistician. 44 (2): 195. doi:10.2307/2348444. JSTOR   2348444.
  11. Ritschard, Gilbert; Gabadinho, Alexis; Muller, Nicolas S.; Studer, Matthias (2008). "Mining event histories: a social science perspective". International Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management. 1 (1): 68. doi:10.1504/IJDMMM.2008.022538. ISSN   1759-1163.
  12. Zighed, Djamel A.; Ritschard, Gilbert; Marcellin, Simon (2010), Ras, Zbigniew W.; Tsay, Li-Shiang (eds.), "Asymmetric and Sample Size Sensitive Entropy Measures for Supervised Learning", Advances in Intelligent Information Systems, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 27–42, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-05183-8_2, ISBN   978-3-642-05183-8 , retrieved December 10, 2023
  13. McArdle, John J.; Ritschard, Gilbert, eds. (2014). Contemporary issues in exploratory data mining in the behavioral sciences. Quantitative methodology series (1. publ ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN   978-0-203-40302-0.
  14. Ritschard, Gilbert (2006), Rizzi, Alfredo; Vichi, Maurizio (eds.), "Computing and using the deviance with classification trees", Compstat 2006 - Proceedings in Computational Statistics, Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag HD, pp. 55–66, doi:10.1007/978-3-7908-1709-6_5, ISBN   978-3-7908-1708-9 , retrieved December 10, 2023
  15. Bürgin, Reto; Ritschard, Gilbert (2015). "Tree-based varying coefficient regression for longitudinal ordinal responses". Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. 86: 65–80. doi:10.1016/j.csda.2015.01.003.
  16. Ritschard, Gilbert; Oris, Michel (2005). "Life Course Data In Demography And Social Sciences: Statistical And Data-Mining Approaches". Advances in Life Course Research. 10: 283–314. doi:10.1016/S1040-2608(05)10011-2.
  17. Widmer, Eric D.; Ritschard, Gilbert (March 1, 2009). "The de-standardization of the life course: Are men and women equal?". Advances in Life Course Research. Linked Lives and Self-Regulation. Lifespan - Life Course: Is it really the same?. 14 (1): 28–39. doi:10.1016/j.alcr.2009.04.001. ISSN   1569-4909.
  18. Studer, Matthias; Ritschard, Gilbert; Gabadinho, Alexis; Müller, Nicolas S. (2011). "Discrepancy Analysis of State Sequences". Sociological Methods & Research. 40 (3): 471–510. doi:10.1177/0049124111415372. ISSN   0049-1241.
  19. Studer, Matthias; Ritschard, Gilbert (February 1, 2016). "What Matters in Differences Between Life Trajectories: A Comparative Review of Sequence Dissimilarity Measures". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society. 179 (2): 481–511. doi: 10.1111/rssa.12125 . ISSN   0964-1998.
  20. Gabadinho, Alexis; Ritschard, Gilbert; Studer, Matthias; Müller, Nicolas S. (2011), Fred, Ana; Dietz, Jan L. G.; Liu, Kecheng; Filipe, Joaquim (eds.), "Extracting and Rendering Representative Sequences", Knowledge Discovery, Knowlege [sic] Engineering and Knowledge Management, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, vol. 128, pp. 94–106, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-19032-2_7, ISBN   978-3-642-19031-5 , retrieved February 17, 2024
  21. Gabadinho, Alexis; Ritschard, Gilbert (2016). "Analyzing State Sequences with Probabilistic Suffix Trees: The PST R Package". Journal of Statistical Software. 72 (3). doi: 10.18637/jss.v072.i03 . ISSN   1548-7660.
  22. Ritschard, Gilbert (2023). "Measuring the Nature of Individual Sequences". Sociological Methods & Research. 52 (4): 2016–2049. doi: 10.1177/00491241211036156 . ISSN   0049-1241.
  23. Ritschard, Gilbert; Liao, Tim F.; Struffolino, Emanuela (2023). "Strategies for Multidomain Sequence Analysis in Social Research". Sociological Methodology. 53 (2): 288–322. doi: 10.1177/00811750231163833 . hdl: 2434/967184 . ISSN   0081-1750.