Congratulations to Bob Xia and Sarthak Das

The Australian Pharmaceutical Biostatistics Group (APBG) are pleased to announce the winners of the APBG Statistics and Data Science Collaboration scholarship. We would like to congratulate Bob Xia (Statistician) and Sarthak Das (Data Scientist) for being selected for this award. Thank you also to all the candidates for their applications, which were of a very high standard.

Bob and Sarthak will work together on a large simulated dataset provided by the APBG to find an algorithm that best fits the data. They will explore the different approaches biostatisticians and data scientists have of answering important clinical questions. We look forward to hearing from them at an upcoming APBG meeting. 

This scholarship opportunity was provided by APBG, in partnership with the SSA.  The Australian Pharmaceutical Biostatistics Group is a not-for-profit association of pharmaceutical industry statisticians in Australia, whose mission is to ensure high statistical standards within Australia to assist in the decision processes which provide safe, efficacious and cost-effective health care products produced in a regulated environment for the health and quality of life of people. For more information on the scholarship, please see the original posting.

Congratulations to our SSA Fellowship Funding Award Recipients!

The SSA extends our congratulations to our latest SSA Fellowship Funding Award Recipients:

• Clara Grazian, UNSW
• David Gunawan, University of Wollongong
• Lauren Kennedy, Monash
• Houying Zhu, Macquarie University
• Tao Zou, ANU

These early career statistical researchers are currently hard at work on their ARC DECRA Fellowship applications. Those whose DECRA applications are successful will receive $3000 to complement their fellowship activities. We wish them, and all of our members applying for DECRAs and Future Fellowships, all the best in the preparation of their applications. A round to support our members applying for NHMRC Investigator Grants (at the Emerging Leadership level) will be opened early in 2022.

Jessica Kasza
SSA President

Sieves help us cook pasta and rice, whilst bootstraps come in handy when donning a pair of boots. The September 2021 seminar to the New South Wales branch had nothing to do with cooking or dressing. However, statistics has borrowed these terms quite heavily and Professor Han Lin Shang of Macquarie University's Department of Actuarial Studies and Business Analytics explained how statistical sieves and statistical bootstraps aid the analysis of functional time series data.

The main parameter of interest throughout the talk was the memory parameter when the time series exhibited long-range dependence. A central question is obtaining confidence intervals for this parameter and a recent Journal of the American Statistical Association paper by the author and two co-authors addressed this problem.

The rise of functional time series data is due to ongoing improvements in technology, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging for measuring brain function. Han Lin described functional data in stochastic process terms and how functional time series arise when the time series index is a continuous time variable. Despite the continuum aspect of the framework, in practice the measurements are at discrete time points. Professor Shang explained the difference between dense and sparse functional data - with the former having high sampling frequency. Various theoretical constructs such as continuous time covariance functions, Mercer's representation, Karhunen-Loeve expansion and functional auto-regressive integrated moving average models were explained as being useful for analysis of functional time series data.

Then speaker Shang discussed long-memory processes and formally introduced the memory parameter. Various estimators were described and, based on the speaker's 2020 simulation study, methodology by time series researchers Peng and Whittle were recommended. After that, the branch was told how sieve bootstrapping can be used to obtain confidence intervals for the memory parameter. Simulation results showed good performance of Professor Shang's new methodology.

At the end of the presentation it was pointed out that the sieve bootstrap approach can be applied to any memory parameter, whilst asymptotic confidence intervals are only possible for a selected range of memory estimators.

Matt Wand, University of Technology Sydney

The SSA Environmental Statistics section proudly announces a new annual student prize for best student paper in environmental statistics.  To be eligible a student must be:

• An author of a paper that has been accepted in the previous 12 months, having made a substantial contribution to the work
• A student at the end of semester 1 this year (June 30 2021)
• A current member of the SSA and the Environmental Statistics Section

The winner will receive $500 and will be asked to present in an invited session at the next annual stats conference (in 2023). 

Please submit your nominations to eo@statsoc.org.au, with Tjanpi Award submission in the header, by 5 PM AEDT Thursday November 4^th 2021, including:

• Full name, institution
• Paper, as one pdf file.
• Letter of support from supervisor or other academic at the institution, confirming student status of applicant and describing the student's role in the paper. 

      Central Australian landscape dominated by Tjanpi, photo by Sara Winter

Tjanpi is the Pitjantjatjara word for Triodia, a spiny tussock-forming grass that dominates the vegetation across more than 20% of Australia’s land mass.  It is a long-lived plant that makes deep roots and can withstand the hardiest of conditions.  It can grow over decades into characteristic ring formations three metres in diameter.  As a source of food and shelter, Tjanpi is fundamental to life in some of Australia’s most extreme conditions, being central to highly diverse ecosystems dominated by termites and ants, as well as reptiles, birds and small mammals.  It has also been traditionally used by Indigenous people for a range of purposes, including building shelters, making an adhesive resin, basket weaving, fishing and using its seeds as a food source. 

Tjanpi is an analogy for the Environmental Statistics student award – because the development and application of appropriate statistical techniques is fundamental to good environmental research, and our hope is that the recipient of this award will grow over the coming decades to become central to a diverse range of interesting research endeavours!

The SA branch of the SSA held its Statistics Careers Event on 8 September, 2021. The event was an opportunity for current students and recent graduates to learn about the sorts of roles that statisticians in South Australia are currently working in. A variety of statisticians gave presentations on the places they work, the skills they have developed in their roles, and upcoming opportunities for graduates.

Sam Rogers represented The Biometry Hub at the University of Adelaide, where statistics and machine learning are used to analyse modern and sophisticated problems in plant breeding, biotechnologies, wine science and human nutrition science.

Chris Davies spoke about the Australia and New Zealand Dialysis and Transplant Registry (ANZDATA), the national registry which collects data on kidney dialysis and transplant patients.

Julian Whiting from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) spoke about the role of statisticians in Australia's official statistics agency, and gave some examples of projects he has been involved in.

Richard Woodman and Barbara Toson from the Flinders Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics (FCEB) discussed their experience of working as statisticians in a medical research group, and the way career paths form out of this work.

Jennie Louise represented Adelaide Health Technology Assessment (AHTA), and spoke about statistical consulting work and the variety of problems and she and her team have come across.

Barbara Francis from Avance CRO discussed the sorts of work undertaken by statisticians preparing designs and analyses for clinical trials in a CRO, as well as opportunities and career paths for statisticians in this company.

Robert Jorissen from SAHMRI spoke about his work on ROSA, the registry of older Australians, and their projects evaluating the epidemiology of aged care in Australia.

Approximately 15 students attended and enjoyed the opportunity to chat with the invited speakers after the presentations, and were able to gain some insight into their future career paths.

We thank all the employers and above listed presenters for their continued support of this event within South Australia. All the students had an opportunity to engage and interact with the presenters after the event.

Annie Conway

Congratulations to SSA members Dr Susanna Cramb and Dr Margarita Moreno-Betancur, who were amongst those awarded National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator Grants. The announcement was made on Tuesday by Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt. Investigator Grants consolidate separate fellowship and research support into one grant scheme that provides the highest-performing researchers at all career stages with funding for their salary (if required) and a significant research support package. These grants provide the investigator with flexibility to pursue important new research directions as they arise and to form collaborations as needed, rather than being restricted to the scope of a specific research project.

Dr Susanna Cramb of the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) Faculty of Health received funding for the research project PLACE (Prioritising Location-based Analysis and Consumer Engagement) for Change. This research uniquely incorporates both complex spatial analyses and lived consumer experience to identify priority areas and propose actionable solutions to help reduce health inequities for cancer, diabetes and injuries. Location plays a key role in Australia’s health inequities yet is usually ignored or aggregated to large regions. This hinders identifying appropriate, localised solutions.

The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute’s (MCRI) Dr Margarita Moreno-Betancur’s project will tackle “big data” problems in longitudinal studies by developing new statistical methods for analysing pathways to disease. “Existing tools simply do not work in data-intensive studies such as those using large-scale biomarker datasets or real-time measurements in clinical care,” she said. “I’m aiming to address this critical gap through an integrated research program that will develop solutions, including dissemination to health researchers, as well as advanced capacity in the critical discipline of biostatistics.”

Both recipients received funding support through SSA’s Fellowship Funding initiative. 

Western Australia’s SSA August branch meeting took on something of a festive air in what looks set to become an annual event – a special joint meeting with the Australasian Region of the International Biometrics Society. The presentation by A/Prof Nicola Armstrong from Curtin University provided an interesting introduction to the topic of epigenetic clocks. The title of her talk was “Investigating Epigenetic Clocks”. These clocks estimate “biological” age from blood or other tissues by measuring modifications to the epigenome, such as levels of DNA methylation (the accumulation of methyl groups to DNA molecules), that occur as a direct consequence of ageing.

Nicola described the basic modelling process that underpins the construction of such epigenetic clocks, being built via a penalized regression such as lasso or elastic net to identify a sparse set of predictive CpGs from the hundreds of thousands of potential methylation sites that are probed. With the supervised learning algorithms trained against chronological age, markers of biological age are derived from observed methylation levels at the final set of predictive sites. Measures of age acceleration/deceleration are then used to assess if underlying tissue ages faster or slower than expected.  For illustration, two popular clocks were applied to three different datasets of elderly cohorts, and results from studies assessing disease-induced tissue degeneration were also presented.   Several issues arising in application of these methods were discussed. These included the impact on performance of missing probes and pre-processing methods, variation arising from use of different platforms, and dependence of biological interpretation on the sample characteristics of the training data set used. A final word of caution regarding model interpretation noted there are inherent limitations in making personal predictions.

The evening drew a good crowd, and the host of questions and lively discussion at its conclusion demonstrated that attendees found the talk interesting and engaging!

Bethy McKinnon