SSA NSW: 2022 AGM + Lancaster Lecture

We are happy to announce that we will be having our 74th (2022) AGM at March 23rd, in the University of Sydney. We encourage you to join us physically so that you will be able to chat to your peers. However, if you would like to attend virtually please register in advance here, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting after registering.

The materials for the AGM will be progressively added to this Dropbox folder. We are still waiting the confirmation about the room booked for our AGM, therefore a separate notification email will be sent at a closer date about the room detail of the AGM, please stay tuned.

Any questions, please feel free to contact: secretary.nswbranch@statsoc.org.au.

Date:  Wednesday, 23rd March 2022

Time:
5:30pm - 6:00pm: Refreshments
6:00pm - 6:30pm: AGM
6:30pm - 7:30pm: Lancaster Lecture
7:30pm onwards: Dinner (at a nearby restaurant). Please RSVP for dinner to attend. 

Venue: Law Building Annex. Law Annex Lecture Theatre 101, University of Sydney

After the AGM we will have the Lancaster Lecture given by our new branch president Dr. Clara Grazian about clustering.

A mixing path from theory to applications

Dr. Clara Grazian

USyd, Sydney

Clustering is an important task in many areas of knowledge: medicine and epidemiology, genomics, environmental science, economics, visual sciences, among others. Methodologies to perform inference on the number of clusters have often been proved to be inconsistent and introducing a dependence structure among the clusters implies additional difficulties in the estimation process. In a Bayesian setting, clustering in the situation where the number of clusters is unknown is often performed by using Dirichlet process priors or finite mixture models. However, the posterior distributions on the number of groups have been recently proved to be inconsistent. This lecture aims at reviewing the Bayesian approaches available to perform via mixture models and give some new point of view.
 
Biography
Dr Clara Grazian received a joint PhD in 2016 from the University Paris-Dauphine, France and the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, working on Bayesian analysis for mixture models and copula models. She then joined the Nuffield Department of Medicine and the Big Data Institute of the University of Oxford to work on an internatinal project trying to invesitigate mechanisms of drug resitance developed by tuberculosis. Before joining the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sydney, Clara was Senior Lecturer in Statistics at the University of New South Wales.