Annual Report 2005 - Fields Institute - University of Toronto

Career: Some Remarks. On August 7, Dick DeVeaux (Williams
College) addressed teaching statistics in an invited
speech on Math is Music; Statistics is Literature – or Why are
there no 6 year old novelists? In addition, two invited panel
sessions featured candid remarks and advice from journal
editors (Annals of Statistics, Canadian Journal of Statistics,
Technometrics and Biometrics) for publishing, and grant
directors/managers (NSF, NSERC, NIH, ONR) for grant
applications.
One highlight of the 2004 NRC is the first time nomination
of the Richard L. Tweedie New Researcher Award. The
award recipient will receive a prize of up to $2000 and be
invited to give a special lecture at the NRC. The IMS Committee
on Special Lectures will decide the award winner.
In summary, the 2004 NRC was a great success, offering
a comfortable setting for new researchers to share their
research and make connections with their peers in informal
settings such as short research presentations and various
social programs.
Special Addresses:
Richard D. DeVeaux (Williams College)
Math is music; statistics is literature – or why are there no 6
year old novelists?
Xihong Lin (Michigan)
Exploring roads to a successful career: some remarks
Terry Speed (UC Berkeley)
How to do statistical research
Jeff C.F. Wu (Georgia Inst. of Tech)
Statistics and statisticians: an amateur’s tour guide
Workshop on Missing Data Problems
August 5–6, 2004
Held at the Fields Institute
Organizers: Richard J. Cook and Don L. McLeish (Waterloo)
Modern data often includes some form of censorship or
missing data. Data imputation is a critical component of
the analysis of such data and crude methods for data imputation
can lead to substantial bias in the results and the
conclusions. Missing data problems are common in health
research (e.g. retrospective and prospective studies), sample
surveys (e.g. non-response), and less obvious parts of any
study in which the data available is influenced by what is
G e n e r a l S c i e n t i f i c A c t i v i t i e s
Jamie Stafford, Richard Cook and Don McLeisch
easy or feasible to collect. Longitudinal studies which collect
data on a set of subjects repeatedly over time are subject
to attrition, subjects drop out because they move and
suffer side effects from drugs, or for other often unknown
reasons. Similarly in sampling, survey non-respondents are
often ignored, although factors related to the objectives of
the study such as income may influence the completeness of
a subject’s response.
The primary goal of this workshop was to provide impetus
to the development of mathematical and statistical tools for
the analysis of data under various patterns of censorship
and mechanisms governing missingness and data imputation.
The workshop brought together researchers from
around the world with common interests in missing data
problems and a broad range of approaches for dealing with
them. Approaches ranged from those based on multiple
imputation, inverse probability weighted and more general
classes of estimating functions, and EM or generalized EM
algorithms. Issues receiving lively discussion included the
importance of robustness, efficiency, identifiability, and the
role of sensitivity analyses. The range of contexts in which
missing data problems were considered included studies
involving retrospective observation, prospective longitudinal
studies, event history studies, survey sampling, finance,
and social sciences. The meeting was supported by Fields,
NPCDS, the University of Waterloo, and GlaxoSmithKline.
Fields Institute 2005 ANNUAL REPORT 59