Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

– temporal point processes, set – indexed martingales, spatial
generalizations of renewal processes and so on.
There is a lot of enthusiasm about this initiative among
forestry researchers including those in ecology and hydrology
as well as in fire. They are open to all sorts of statistical
and probabilistic ideas. This is evident from a subsequent
electronic discussion group that has been established that
includes over 40 subscribers. This has been instrumental
in the preparation of a proposal for a full NPCDS project.
In addition, a follow-up meeting will take place at the
Banff International Research Station next spring and a
promising proposal has been submitted to GEOIDE for
matching funds. All of this activity in such a short space of
time speaks to the vibrant environment being created by
this group and to the promise of significant advances at the
interface of Forestry, Probability and Statistics.
The Centre de recherches mathématiques hosted the joint
NPCDS/SAMSI workshop on Latent Variable Models and
Survey Data for Social and Health Sciences Research. The
workshop was attended by about 65 participants, from
Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Although the majority of participants were statisticians
from universities or government agencies, there was also
a good representation from the social sciences and health
sciences. The opening tutorial, by Anders Skrondal and
Sophia Rabe-Hesketh was based on their recent book
and covered a great deal of ground, including a thorough
introduction to the authors’ framework for latent variable
models, and a variety of interesting applications. It was very
valuable for both experts and newcomers to latent variable
modelling. The meeting was tied to the NPCDS Complex
survey data project.
The workshop provided an opportunity to showcase some
of the accomplishments of the SAMSI theme year on latent
variable models. A review and summary was provided by
the organizer of the theme year, Ken Bollen of the University
of North Carolina. Some of the sessions included
reports and discussions of the activity of the complex
surveys working group, formed at the opening workshop
at SAMSI in September 2004. The difficulties in adapting
latent variable methods to complex survey data are perhaps
best appreciated in the context of multi-level models. Chris
Skinner of Southampton University provided an excellent
overview of progress to date in this area. Under his leadership,
the complex surveys working group had focused on
weighting and estimation for multilevel models. Several
papers at the workshop provided further insights into
currently available estimation techniques and software. A
T h e N a t i o n a l P r o g r a m o n
C o m p l e x D a t a S t r u c t u r e s
very gratifying feature of the workshop was the high quality
of the presentations, and of the analyses put forward
in applications. Attempts will be made to organize more
occasions for statisticians and social scientists to interact on
methodological challenges.
A project on DataMining is being vetted by NPCDS, following
an inaugural workshop held at Fields October 28–30,
2004 (see the detailed report later in this section). The idea
for this meeting emerged from discussions Fields organized
between Generation 5 and NPCDS. A follow-up meeting is
planned for fall 2005.
In other news, an NPCDS project on the Design and Analysis
of Computer Experiments for Complex Systems received
final approval and is moving forward following a successful
inaugural workshop held at BIRS, July13–17, 2004. NPCDS
funding also supported various interactions with SAMSI,
and allowed junior researchers to attend the August 5–6,
2004 Fields workshop on Missing Data Problems (see the
General Scientific Activity section for a description of this
event). Inaugural workshops on Spatial-temporal models for
Marine Ecological Systems and Longitudinal and Clustered
Data Analysis take place August and October of 2005
respectively. Please watch for announcements as student
travel stipends are available.
NPCDS Projects underway
Statistical Methods for Complex Survey Data (inaugural
workshop April 30–May 2, 2003 at CRM)
Statistical Genomics (inaugural workshop September 3–5,
2003 at Fields)
Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments for
Complex Systems (inaugural workshop July 13–17, 2004 at
BIRS)
Workshops
Workshop on Missing Data Problems
August 5–6, 2004
Held at the Fields Institute
- see General Scientific Activity section for a description of
the event
Data Mining Methodology and Applications Workshop
October 28–30, 2004.
Held at the Fields Institute
Organizers: Hugh Chipman (Acadia), Antonio Ciampi
(McGill) and Michael Vainder (Generation 5)
Data mining is the science of learning from large and complex
data sets. Although it lies at the intersection of many
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 48