Dr. Gilbert Ritschard 

Gilbert Ritschard

Gilbert Ritschard is a full professor of statistics at the Department of Economics of the University of Geneva, where he is responsible for the program of statistics and quantitative methods for the social sciences. He runs his researches within the Institute for Demographic and Life Course Studies and acts as vice-dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences since 2007. He graded in econometrics and got his Ph.D. in Econometrics and Statistics at the University of Geneva in 1979.

He taught as invited professor in Toronto, Montreal, Lyon, Lausanne and Fribourg and participated as a statistical expert in several large statistical modeling projects of International Organizations.

He wrote several papers on topics including among others the mining of event histories, sequence analysis, survey sampling, atypical data detection, analysis and modeling of discrete data, decision trees and text mining. He headed or co-headed several funded applied researches on, for example: The mining of Swiss life course histories; Differential mortality; Life courses in the 19th century Geneva; Social dialog between unions, enterprises and government; The dynamics of real estate prices in the Geneva cross-border region. He also published papers in economics as well as on more applied topics in the field of social sciences, especially in demography, sociology and social science history.

With his team he developed the world wide used TraMineR toolbox for exploring and analysing sequence data in R. His present research interests are in categorical and numerical longitudinal data analysis and their application to life course analysis. He currently leads a methodological individual project of the national center of competence in research (NCCR) "LIVES: Overcoming vulnerability, life course perspectives."

Attached is a short description of the course on Sequential Data Analysis.

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