Tags: Colloquium Series

The Statistics Department hosts weekly colloquia on a variety of statistcal subjects, bringing in speakers from around the world.


Sandra Esi Safo

Advancement in technology and computing power have led to the generation of data with enormous amount of variables when compared to the number of observations. These types of data, also known as high dimension, low sample size, are plagued with different challenges that either require modifications of existing traditional methods or development of new statistical methods. One of these challenges is the development of Sparse methods that use only…


Emmanuel Tuglo

The analysis of univariate and multivariate longitudinal data (U/MLD) with censored and missing response has inspired considerable interest in the statistical community recently. In the case of MLD, estimating the contemporaneous correlation coefficient is of particular interest to applied researchers. In this dissertation, mixed model methodologies are investigated to analyze U/MLD with censored and missing response while accounting for complex…


Xiaoming Huo

This talk will have two components. In the first part, I will give an overview of NSF, and its resources that are relevant to the statistical science. Some related programs that are beyond the Division of Mathematical Science, such as the Big Data program and the Computational and Data-enabled Science and Engineering program, will be reviewed. Some suggestions regarding how to apply to these programs may be provided. In the second part of this…


Ping-Shou Zhong

Structured covariance matrices characterized by a small number of parameters have been widely used and play an important role in parameter estimation and statistical inference. To assess the adequacy of a specified covariance structure, one often adopts the classical likelihood-ratio test when the dimension of the data (p) is smaller than the sample size (n). However, this assessment becomes quite challenging when p is bigger than n, since the…


Yichen Qin

In this talk, we introduce a robust testing procedure — the Lq-likelihood ratio test (LqLR).  We derive the asymptotic distribution of our test statistic and demonstrate its robustness properties both analytically and numerically. We further investigate the properties of its influence function and breakdown point.  We also propose a method for selecting the tuning parameter q, and demonstrate that, with the q selected using our…


Weng Kee Wong

Experimental costs are rising and it is important to use minimal resources to make statistical inference with maximal precision. Optimal design theory and ideas are increasingly applied to address design issues in a growing number of disciplines, and they include biomedicine, biochemistry, education, agronomy, manufacturing industry, toxicology and food science, to name a few.   I first present a brief overview of optimal design…


Jiming Jiang

We study behavior of the restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimator under a misspecified linear mixed model (LMM) that has received much attention in recent gnome-wide association studies. The asymptotic analysis establishes consistency of the REML estimator of the variance of the errors in the LMM, and convergence in probability of the REML estimator of the variance of the random effects in the LMM to a certain limit, which is equal to the…


Lynne Billard

Massively large data sets are routine and ubiquitous given modern computer capabilities. What is not so routine is how to analyse these data. One approach is to aggregate the data sets according to some scientific criteria. The resultant data are perforce symbolic data, i.e., lists, intervals, histograms, and so on. Applications abound, especially in the medical and social sciences. Other data sets (small or large in size) are naturally symbolic…


Christopher Nachtsheim

Definitive Screening Designs (DSDs), discovered in 2011, are a new alternative to standard two-level screening designs. There are many desirable features of this family of designs. They require few runs while providing orthogonal main effects and avoiding any confounding of main effects by two-factor interactions. In addition they allow for estimating any quadratic effect of the continuous factors. The two-factor interactions are correlated but…


Pengsheng Ji

We collect the coauthor and citation data for all research papers published in four of the top journals in statistics between 2003 and 2012, analyze the data from several different perspectives (e.g., patterns, trends, community structures) and present an array of interesting findings. (1) Both the average numbers of papers per author published in these journals and the fraction of self citations have been decreasing, but the proportion of…
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