PhD Students

Jeanne Tous is a PhD student working under the supervision of Julien Chiquet and Wilfried Thuiller. She works on developing PLN-block, an extension of PLN-network that would account for potential group structures in the inferred networks. Her research focuses on applications to ecology and the study of biodiversity in order to enhance our vision of species association networks evolution through the observation of such group structures.

Barbara Bricout is pursuing her doctoral studies in the field of statistics applied to ecological sciences, with guidance from Stephane Robin, Sophie Donnet, and the Tour du Valat. The primary focus of her research is to address the challenge of imputing missing data in waterbird count data within the context of North Africa. Specifically, she aims to expand the application of the Poisson Log-Normal (PLN) model to accommodate data characterized by multidimensional covariates, significant overdispersion, and an abundance of zero values.

Bastien Batardiere is currently pursuing a PhD in statistical learning under the supervision of Julien Chiquet. His research is centered around expanding the PLN model to handle extensive datasets, with a specific emphasis on its adaptation for high-dimensional single-cell RNA data. Given the prevalence of zero values in this type of data, he is investigating a zero-inflated version of the PLN model. The outcomes of his research are incorporated into the pyPLNmodels package. Additionally, Bastien is delving into the theoretical guarantees associated with PLN models.