SPECIALISATION / RESEARCH INTERESTS
· Sampling methods, area, list and multiple frames sample designs; use of administrative data for agricultural statistics;
· Use of remote sensing, geographic information systems and global positioning systems for agricultural and rural statistics;
· Adaptive sampling, design of experiments, and other statistical methods for continuous innovation, quality control and impact evaluation;
· Design and analysis of agricultural, rural, land use, forestry and agro-environmental statistics;
· Analysis and use of geographic and geo-referenced information, impact of spatial resolution, change of support and transformations of spatial data, spatial statistics;
· Analysis and forecasting of prices of cereals;
· Design and analysis of national and international statistics for agricultural and rural development;
· Statistical methods for analysing financial markets;
· Rural building and land use analysis and planning;
· Agro-meteorological yield forecasting models.
Main research subjects concern: sequential adaptive methods,
area sample surveys, incomplete and multiple frames, use of remote
sensing data for statistical purposes, spatial statistics, also
developing relationships between the various research fields. Main
applications of these methods are the quality control and the
validation of geo-referenced data bases; the optimization of area
and point frame sample designs, a model for the study of changes in
the rural built environment, the production of agricultural land
cover statistics and the analysis of the book market and of reading
habits.
A research subject is the development of efficient adaptive
sequential methods which, under general conditions, in the finite
population sampling approach, guaranty unbiased estimates of the
population parameters. Main applications of these methods are the
quality control and the validation of geo-referenced data bases,
particularly the photo-interpretation of remote sensing data, and
the survey of land cover data in the presence of measurement
errors.
Sample surveys, multiple frames sample designs, spatial
statistics, statistical aspects of remote sensing data, analysis of
survey data and of national and international statistics, with
particular reference to agricultural, forestry, land use,
environmental and agro-environmental data.
The relationship created between area frame sample designs and
spatial statistics has the aim of optimizing area and point sample
surveys through strategies which involve the spatial
autocorrelation in the sample design and use auxiliary variables
with geographic coordinates.
The link between area frame sample designs, the use of remote
sensing data and adaptive sequential sampling has allowed to create
a model for the studyof changes in the rural built environment.
A research field is the use of remote sensing data for producing
agriculture and land use statistics, also evaluating the cost
effectiveness and the combined use of various information sources
for creating monitoring systems of the agricultural
environments.
Other research subjects are inferential methods for estimating
distribution functions, regressive models for qualitative and
quantitative data applied to territorial and medical problems and
the analysis of the book market and of reading habits.
