Family caring responsibilities (such as caring for children or elders) can be a barrier to conference participation. The SSA will make a number of bursaries available to people wishing to attend ANZSC2020  to help defray the additional costs of familial caring responsibilities.

SSA members who will incur additional costs associated with familial caring responsibilities due to their attendance at ANZSC2020 are invited to apply for a bursary. These bursaries are available to people of all genders. These funds could be spent on additional childcare or eldercare expenses that would arise as a result of attendance at the conference, or on flights for an accompanying person to look after children while the awardee is at the conference, for example. Bursary awardees do not need to present work at the conference to be eligible for a bursary. The SSA has a maximum of $2000 available for these bursaries, with the maximum amount available to any one applicant being $500.

The application form is available here. Applicants need to confirm they are a member of SSA, and intend to attend ANZSC2020. A short statement is required on how attendance at ANZSC2020 would be beneficial for their career, and details of the requested funds. Successful applicants would be reimbursed upon presentation of ANSZC2020 registration confirmation and receipts/invoices. The deadline for applications is March 25 2020, with decisions to be communicated to applicants by April 6 2020 (the Early Bird Registration deadline of ANZSC2020).

There will be a pre-conference workshop at ANZSC in July on logistic regression in Autostat. We have a trip report from the BayesComp workshop in January, which was attended by members of the Bayes SSA section. The ISBA Program Council have extended the early registration and poster submission deadlines for the ISBA World Meeting and BAYSM (June/July, 2020). A reminder about ABC in Grenoble (March, 2020) and announcement of an SMC workshop in Madrid (May, 2020).

There will be a pre-conference workshop “From machine learning to statistical modelling (Frequentist & Bayesian), via logistic regression in Autostat” held on Sunday, July 5, prior to the Australian Statistical Society and New Zealand Statistical Association Conference (ANZSC) on the Gold Coast. This year Griffith University has planned 70 workshops and other training events, delivered by 20 presenters, on statistics or mixed (quant/qual) methods. Several workshops introduce a Bayesian approach for particular models, with computing in Autostat and/or R. There are also introductory workshops on

“Understanding Probability”, and “Classical vs Bayesian Statistical Modelling.” All workshops are advertised a few months ahead here.  Please have patience with a new process for attendees external to Griffith University to

enrol in workshops here.

The biennial BayesComp workshop, sponsored by the Bayesian computation section of ISBA, took place January 7-10 in Gainesville, Florida. The conference promotes original research into computational methods across all strands of Bayesian research. This year’s plenary talks included cutting-edge topics such as Continuous-time MCMC, variational inference (VI), as well as Bayesian analysis of large-scale time series. The advancement of methodology for high-dimensional and complex models was a persistent theme of the conference. An underlying theme of research present in many talks was the move away from more traditional, exact, Bayesian methods, to alternative methods that are approximate or robust to model misspecification. 

The 5th Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting (BAYSM) will take place in Kunming, China from June 26-27, 2020. Deadline for submission of abstracts is March 29. Due to concerns about the current coronavirus epidemic, the ISBA Program Council have extended the early-bird registration deadline for the ISBA World Meeting (Kunming, China, June 29 – July 3) until May 15. They will keep submission of contributed posters open until May 15 as well. More details about the conference programme are available here.

A workshop on Approximate Bayesian Computation, ABC in Grenoble, will be held in France on March 19 and 20. More details are available here.

A workshop on Sequential Monte Carlo methods, SMC 2020, will be held in Madrid, Spain, May 27 – 29. More details are available here.

Executive Committee, Bayes Section of SSA (Chris Drovandi, Clara Grazian, David Frazier, Sama Low-Choy & Matt Moores)

Twitter: @BayesSSA

https://statsoc.org.au/Bayesian-Statistics

Editors: Helen MacGillivray, Robert Gould, Jim Ridgway

The special issue of Teaching Statistics will be published in 2020 as an e-book, titled Teaching Data Science and Statistics: senior school or introductory tertiary.

A variety of chapters is envisaged, with a small number of invited chapters, and most oriented to classroom-ready ideas, case studies and/or materials embodying good teaching practice. Each of the latter type of chapter should focus on one or more aspects of statistical data investigations and data science. Authors will find valuable guidance in Unit 1 of the framework of the International Data Science for School Project (IDSSP). Case study approaches should embody classroom-ready implementation, with a rich data context with a number of variables.

Chapters should be between 2,000 and 4,000 words, and no more than 5,000 words, including references, figures and any appendices. Resources such as data, code, notes for teachers/instructors, and videos, may be placed in an online repository. Authors may wish to provide short, dynamic videos.

Timeline

• Submissions to be made online to Teaching Statistics via ScholarOne.
• Deadline for submissions, 25^th April, 2020.
• Referee reports to authors by 30^th June, 2020.
• Deadline for revised submissions, 31^st August, 2020.
• Proofs to authors by 15^th October, 2020.
• Deadline for corrections to proofs, 22^nd October, 2020.
• Issue compilation, 29^th October, 2020.
• Issue approved, 7^th November, 2020.
• To printer and published online, 14^th November, 2020.
• Published in print, 21^st November, 2020.

Teaching Statistics, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679639, is published by Wiley on behalf of the Teaching Statistics Trust. It is intended for all those who teach statistics to students aged up to 19 years. The emphasis is on good practice in teaching statistics and statistical thinking in any context. Teaching Statistics seeks to inform, enlighten, stimulate, guide, correct, inspire, entertain and encourage. Teaching Statistics is a refereed journal, with double-blind reviewing.

For more information contact the Teaching Statistics editor h.macgillivray@qut.edu.au . Also see Teaching Statistics, 42 (1).

Helen MacGillivray

The Statistical Society of Australian and CSIRO/Data61 are delighted to announce the inaugural winners of the Betty Allan travel award as:

•  Karen Lamb who will visit the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in Cambridge
• Sharmala Thuraisingam who will visit the University of Calgary and attend the North American Primary Care Research Group Conference

The award of $3000 each is to support early career female statisticians in Australia to travel anywhere in the world in order to further their career.

There were 14 applications for what should have been just one award, but the judging panel recommended two awards because they were so impressed with the quality of the applications.

The president of the Statistical Society of Australia, Adrian Barnett, said, “The quality of the applications was inspiring. It proves that we have incredible early career female statisticians in Australia. But it did make the final decision very difficult.”

Frances Elizabeth (“Betty”) Allan (1905 to 1952) was CSIRO’s first statistician and provided statistical support across the organisation. She also lectured in mathematics and statistics at Canberra University College and Australian Forestry School. When she married in 1940 she was forced to retire, which was the law for female public servants.

The award will be open again in 2020 with applications called for in November. For details on last year’s application click here.

Adriano Polpo, Associate Professor at UWA, spoke in the June meeting about Optimal Sample-Size-Dependent Significance Levels. The talk was based on the work (DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2018.1518268) published on the The American Statistician special issue about “Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond p < 0.05”. It can be seen that this is a hot topic given the number of publications in this issue is over 40. But Adriano and his coauthors address or revisit the nuances of hypothesis testing in the classical approaches in order to prepare the way for their approach to what has recently been a vexed question involving whether or not or how to use p-values?

For those who do not know Adriano, he has recently taken up his position at UWA having come from the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil, where he spent 12 years. He originally got his PhD from the University of Sao Paulo in the year 2005 and has also taken post-doctoral study at Florida State University.  He was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but also has dual citizenship with Italy.  On the other hand, he does not confess to speaking Italian. Interestingly he tells me that he learnt English by using the computer.

The statisticians know of the inconsistency, or paradox, in the current classical tests of significance that are based on p-value statistics that are compared to the canonical significance levels (10%, 5%, and 1%). Adriano and his colleagues argued that researchers do not need to completely abandon the p-value, rather, they should instead stop using significance levels that do not depend on sample sizes. A testing procedure was presented, with a significance level that is a function of sample size, obtained from a generalized form of the Neyman–Pearson Lemma.

At the conclusion of his talk several people dined afterwards and continued discussions at the  Bateman Chinese Malaysian Eating House.

Brenton Clarke

On the 12^th November 2019 Cathryn Lewis who is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology and Statistics at Kings College London, University of London received her Frank Hansford-Miller Fellowship medal, and led the audience in a tour through some of her research in a talk titled “Polygenic risk scores to predict risk of disease, hype, hope and statistical reality”. Cathryn has been working at her present position for 20 years and describes herself as someone who works on applied statistics.  This is very fitting as Frank was very enthusiastic for applied statistics and the benefit that it could bring to the whole of society.   Cathryn trained as a mathematical statistician, receiving a BA from Oxford, then a Masters and PhD from the University of Sheffield, before moving to do a postdoctoral work at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA. Here she was involved with discovering the link between the BRCA1 gene and the risk of breast cancer, which has motivated a lot of interest in genetics and risk ever since. She returned to England taking up her current position which she has worked at apart from short sojourns off for having children.  

Cathryn noted that while she was in London reading about Frank she was struck by the quote “He was a rather eccentric Englishman who adopted Australia as his home after he retired from the UK”. On arriving in Perth, she could now see exactly why he had done this and volunteered to say that if we have any tutorial posts in 10 years time she would certainly be interested.

The synopsis of Cathryn Lewis’ talk started with an introduction to genetics and polygenic risk scores, analysis methods, challenges, and a return to quote Frank Hansford-Miller.

She introduced the discovery of DNA and highlighted the work of Rosalyn Franklin, somewhat overlooked when discussing the discovery of DNA in 1953 by Crick and Watson.

She then talked about why a statistician may be interested in DNA by alluding to the fact that there were 3 billion base pairs in the DNA which would take us 50 years to type out one letter at a time, but pointed out there were 0.1 % of these pairs distinguished us as individuals.  While 0.1% is small this percentage of 3 billion is quite an amount of data.  She went on to discuss the link or hypothesis that various alleles could lead to increased risk of disorders such as depression.  The genetics technology now looks at sites across half a million sites at one time examining the whole genome at one time.  There are matrices of data, and each row is examined at one row at a time, and individuals are examined for cases and controls.  There are adjustments for ancestry. Essentially for each SNP a logistic regression is carried out so that one gets an odds ratio for a particular increased risk of a particular allele.  The studies involve P-values which are adjusted for the large numbers of tests carried out.

In comparison to other disorders “hits” due to particular gene types only began for depression in 2015.  Risks on a polygenic scale now lead to risk scores for every individual that give you information on risk of the disorder.  Methods involve weighted scores across all SNP’s..  There are considerations of correlation and independence

Results involve scores that have roughly a normal distribution, and then interest is in the tails.

 How do we predict outcomes for cases and controls?

We were led through various statistical methodologies of Cohen’s D and Nagelkerke’s R.

Depression has a prevalence disorder of 15%.    Some discussion ensued about course of illness.

A discussion of risk in other areas put the ideas of screening for various disorders in perspective, and it was pointed out that predictions of disorder were not the same for African as opposed to European cases whereupon ancestry is important.

There is still a need to increase the predictive ability.  We have gone from a yes/no genetic description to a polygenic risk on a normal scale.

To remind us of the aptness of her work Cathryn pointed to a quote from

Frank “We have been become too technical and should ask “How is this piece or research going to help humanity””

and challenged us all to play a part in making statistics relevant to society.  She closed her talk with a picture of the double helix in the DNA tower at Kings Park.

Brenton R Clarke

Following the initial round of public consultations, the Australian Research Council (ARC), Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and Stats NZ have now published the ANZSRC Review Consultation Draft. The proposed changes to both the Fields of Research (FoR) and Socio-Economic Objectives (SEO) classifications are now available for comment until 10 February 2020.

The Consultation Draft and details on how to make a submission are available on the ARC website.

The ANZSRC Review Consultation Draft proposes significant changes to both the Fields of Research (FoR) and Socio-Economic Objectives (SEO) classifications based on initial consultations. A new Division-level (‘2-digit’) classification for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori, and Pacific Peoples research is proposed for both the FoR classification and the SEO classification. These new Divisions would allow for greater recognition and visibility of this important and unique sector of the Australian and New Zealand research landscape.

Other proposed changes to the FoR classification include splitting Division 11 Medical and Health Sciences into two Divisions and removing Division 10 Technology by distributing its Groups among other Divisions. It is also proposed that the Sector level of the SEO classification be removed to align with the FoR hierarchy.

This draft is not final and the ANZSRC Review Steering Committee is allowing time for changes before finalisation of the new ANZSRC classification. Feedback is sought on:

• Whether the revised classifications accurately capture the current Australian and New Zealand research landscape.
• Whether any errors or ambiguities have been introduced in the drafting process.
• Concordance between the old and revised ANZSRC classifications, including

• where codes have been deleted, where would that research be classified in the revised ANZSRC?
• where new codes have been created, where would that research have been classified in ANZSRC 2008?

To assist in a balanced evaluation of the draft, submissions in support of changes are also welcomed. This will be the last opportunity for public comment on the ANZSRC draft. It is anticipated that the final updated ANZSRC will be published in mid-2020.

If you have any questions regarding the ANZSRC Review or the Consultation Draft, please contact the ARC on 02 6287 6755 or ARC-ANZSRCReview@arc.gov.au.

Kind regards,

ANZSRC Review Team

Australian Research Council I Phone: 02 6287 6755

I can't believe we are reaching the end of another year already. Where did the time go? This year has seen many things happening in the statistical community and within SSA. Below I have listed just a few:

First of all we held a record number of workshops and other events. SSA’s branches and sections truly outdid themselves with their offerings to members, organising events for the many different interest groups within the society. I noticed especially the many events for our students or early career statisticians, all aimed at creating a kick-start to a successful career in statistics.

It is the many, many volunteers at branch and section level that made this possible and we can’t thank them enough.

The Betty Allen Travel Award was launched for the first time, and we received a good number of outstanding applications, making it very difficult to make a decision.  The lucky winner will be notified in January. Then there was the inaugural Louise Ryan Best Presentation Award, awarded at YSC2019 by the wonderful Louise Ryan herself.

We now have a new ANZSTAT list on our very own website, drawing the statistical community closer together, which is fantastic.

SSA’s relationship with the Australian Bureau Statistics reached a new level with an official partnership between the two organisations being contracted and recently extended into next year! This is fantastic news indeed and opens many opportunities for strategic collaboration and funding of special projects. This partnership has also supported the International Data Science in Schools Project, which aims to create a 2 year, 240 hour course in Data Science for year 11 and 12 students, and an accompanying course to train teachers to give it, to be delivered internationally.

The SSA continues to improve its value proposition to members. We now have member discounts for Wiley, OUP, Taylor & Francis, Routledge, CRC Press, shinyapps and Significance magazine. We have created a page of videos of branch talks that are only available to members. A new webinar series started in the second half of 2019 and has proven immensely popular. One of the highlights would have to be the recent webinar with Sir David Spiegelhalter. We are delighted to be able to offer recordings of our webinars on the SSA website for our members. The link to Sir David’s webinar will be made available shortly. Please check the webinar page from time to time.

The results of the Federal Election in May took all of us by surprise and almost seven months on we are still grappling with questions about opinion polls and how they got it so wrong, but we will try to get to the bottom of this.

Let’s keep the momentum going into the next year!

Thank you for your continued support of the Statistical Society of Australia. You are the Society and you make coming to work every day a pleasure for me.

During what is for many a holiday time, let us look out for one another, keep safe and share plenty of smiles with those around us.

Very warm greetings and a happy, peaceful and prosperous new year.

Marie-Louise Rankin, 
Executive Officer, SSA

Bayes on the Beach, the 13^th biennial meeting of the Bayesian Section of SSA, was held in Surfers Paradise, Queensland, in November. It featured keynote presentations and tutorials by Prof Antonietta Mira (Università della Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, Switzerland), Prof Sudipto Banerjee (University of California, Los Angeles, USA), A/Prof Renate Meyer (University of Auckland, New Zealand), Prof Nial Friel (University College Dublin, Ireland), Prof Heikki Haario (Finnish Meteorological Institute, Finland), Prof Mark Briers (Alan Turing Institute for Data Science, UK), and Dr Jegar Pitchforth (Booking.com BV), as well as many excellent talks and posters. A particular highlight was a game of beach cricket, in memory of Prof Richard J. Boys, a previous speaker at Bayes on the Beach who sadly passed away earlier this year. Many thanks to the organising committee and to our sponsors for making this event possible, and to all attendees for their enthusiastic participation.

A game of beach cricket in memory of Richard Boys. Photo by Cheryle Blair.

The symposium on Data Science for Social Good at QUT featured a keynote presentation by Prof Sir Peter Donnelly (Genomics PLC and the University of Oxford) as well as talks on conservation, the environment, healthcare, genetics, data science for non-profits, food security, public policy, and artificial intelligence. This was followed in the evening by the launch of the QUT Centre for Data Science.

Executive Committee of the Bayesian Section of SSA

@BayesSSA

https://www.statsoc.org.au/Bayesian-Statistics