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*New* Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research – Open Course on Topics in Digital and Computational Demography (Application Deadline 09/28/25)

Posted: 9/18/2025 ()

Topics in Digital and Computational Demography

    • Date: 3-7 November 2025
    • Coordinator: Risto Conte Keivabu
    • Instructors: Boris Barron, Irena Chen, Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Risto Conte Keivabu, Jordan Klein, Ebru Sanlitürk, Benjamin-Samuel Schlueter, Tom Theile, Emilio Zagheni
    • Application deadline: 28 September 2025

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) is offering a new edition of its open course on Topics in Digital and Computational Demography (3-7 November 2025) and encourages qualified candidates to apply.

 

This year, topics include:

  • Introduction to Digital and Computational Demography; Approaches for combining representative data and non-probabilistic samples; Identifying sources of bias in digital trace data and adjusting for them. In the practice session, we will scrape websites with R and then access web-APIs from OpenAI with R.
  • Digital trace data for migration research: Introduction to migration theories and ethics of digital data use; Fundaments of data collection and analysis of digital trace data; Advantages and critical challenges of using different types of digital trace data, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Trends, Wikipedia, and Bibliometric data.
  • Introduction to geospatial and environmental data; Working with geospatial data in R; Advantages and pitfalls of available open data on the environment; Working with open geospatial and environmental data; Handling of environmental data for demographic research; Introducing a geospatial component to migration/mobility data.
  • Simulations in the social sciences; Formulating assumptions into empirical tests; Loss functions for performance evaluation; Ordinary differential equations in modeling contexts; Empirical vs mechanistic models; Verifying and calibrating models.
  • Bayesian approaches with applications to demography, Introduction to Bayes (comparison to frequentist statistics) including Bayes rule; implementation of MCMC algorithms (HMC, Gibbs), interpretation of results (credible intervals, posterior distributions) and model diagnostics; mortality models; methods for estimation issues in demography (missing data, small area estimation, multiple data sources).

The course will be offered in a hybrid format: in-person for students in the IMPRS-PHDS network who are already in Rostock; online (via Zoom) for everyone else.

How to apply

For more information and application instructions, please see the detailed course description.

To apply, please complete this form.

The deadline for applications is 28 September 2025. Applicants will be informed of their admission by 8 October 2025.

If you have any questions, reach out to phds@demogr.mpg.de