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 The University of Geneva (French: ''Université de Genève'') is a public university, public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 1559 by French theologian John Calvin as a Theology, theological seminary. It rema ...

. He earned a Ph.D. in

Econometrics Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics", '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. 8 ...

and

Statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

at the

in 1979. His main contributions are in

sequence analysis In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. It can be performed on the entire genome ...

. He initiated and led the SNFS project that developed th
TraMineR
R toolkit for sequence analysis. He is one of the founders of th
Sequence Analysis Association
which he served as first president.

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

. In his doctoral dissertation titled (in French) ontributions 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. Such qualitative systems (introduced by

Paul Samuelson Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "h ...

in his

Foundations of Economic Analysis ''Foundations of Economic Analysis'' is a book by Paul A. Samuelson published in 1947 (Enlarged ed., 1983) by Harvard University Press. It is based on Samuelson's 1941 doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. The book sought to demonstrate a ...

) are of special interest in comparative static analysis. 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 UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is an intergovernmental organization within the United Nations Secretariat that promotes the interests of developing countries in world trade. It was established in 1964 by the United Nations General Assembl ...

(UNCTAD) where he participated at the development of a large-scale economic model (see thesis back cover.) He then spent one year as professor at the Department of Economics of the

Université du Québec à Montréal The (UQAM; ), is a French language, French-language public university, public research university based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is the largest constituent element of the system. UQAM was founded on April 9, 1969, by the government o ...

before returning to Geneva as ''maître-assistant'' ssistant professorin 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'
CV
) He was one of the promoters of th
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: *

Mathematical economics Mathematical economics is the application of Mathematics, mathematical methods to represent theories and analyze problems in economics. Often, these Applied mathematics#Economics, applied methods are beyond simple geometry, and may include diff ...

* Regression diagnostics * Path analysis *

Data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

* Tree methods * Life course *

Sequence analysis In bioinformatics, sequence analysis is the process of subjecting a DNA, RNA or peptide sequence to any of a wide range of analytical methods to understand its features, function, structure, or evolution. It can be performed on the entire genome ...

: exploration, clustering, and visualization, discrepancy analysis, measures of dissimilarities, representative sequences, probabilistic suffix trees, sequence indicators, multidomain/multichannel analysis

References

External links

Official faculty page for Gilbert Ritschard at CIGEV, University of Geneva.

Gilbert Ritschard's Google Scholar page.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ritschard, Gilbert 1950 births Living people Academic staff of the University of Geneva Swiss statisticians