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BIOMETRIC
Vol. 33 No. 2 • April–June 2016
BULLETIN
International Biometric Society Internationale Biometrische Gesellschaft Société International de Biométrie
“Biometry, the active pursuit of biological knowledge by quantitative methods.” - R.A. Fisher, 1948
President’s Corner
Greetings!
Although we are all
looking forward to the
IBC in Victoria, now only
six weeks away, I am
writing to you from
Salvador, Brazil, where I
am currently participating in the RBras 61st
Annual Meeting. Salvador has one of the
smaller groups of RBras members, but they
have put together an excellent meeting
showing the diversity of Biometry in Brazil,
from medicine and public health to agriculture and the environment. Brazil of course is
one of our older regions, but in other regional news, it is a pleasure to inform you that
the Malawi Region is now officially formed
and that this youngest region of the IBS
family will host the SUSAN meeting in 2017.
Here in Salvador, it has been a pleasure to
meet the President of ISI, Pedro Silva. As
you may know, ISI and IBS have recently
formalized the relationship between the two
Societies with an MOU, but this is really just
recognition of our ongoing relationship as
the two international statistical societies with
a mission of education and research in statistical science around the world. As usual we
will have an ISI Showcase Session at the IBC
in Victoria, organized by Kaye Basford on the
important topic of ‘Global Food Security.’ An
IBS session is also planned for the July 2017
ISI meeting in Marrakech.
Often at the regional meetings, it is encouraging to see so many younger members here
in Salvador. Although the Meet the Presidents
Roundtable had fewer participants and a higher
average age than we had hoped, the thoroughly Brazilian party that followed showed there
is much youthful energy here. The number of
Brazilian iPhones that now contain a photo
of me with some younger participant simply
shows that the next generation celebrates and
remembers their meetings in a different way.
But for most IBS members, foremost in our
thoughts is the upcoming IBC, the major
biennial event of our Society, as we prepare
to welcome all those who are coming to
Victoria. The heaviest burden of preparation
has of course fallen on the IPC and LOC, but
now invited and contributed sessions are set
and are being slotted.
The Council’s task has been on our major
awards. Three members with longtime and
distinguished service to IBS have been named
Honorary Life Members: Kaye Basford
(Australasia Region), Peter Bauer (AustroSwiss Region) and Thomas Louis (ENAR).
Additionally, the Rob Kempton Award for outstanding contributions to the development
of biometry in the developing world is presented to Jane Hutton for her sustained contribution to the inclusion of biometry in the
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
(AIMS) program of education in Africa.These
awardees will be recognized at the upcoming
IBC Awards Ceremony. At that same event, we
will welcome members of the Breslow family
to remember with us our former President
and Honorary Life Member, Norm Breslow.
The Awards Fund Committee has also been
busy and has made 14 travel awards to IBC
participants (five of them students) from
developing countries. The recipients represent a wide geographic spread, coming from:
Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Turkey,
Pakistan, India and Brazil. Other Committees
have been responsible for our showcase sessions. In addition to the ISI Showcase Session,
we have our usual awards for Best Papers
1
Biometric Bulletin
IN THIS ISSUE
President’s Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
From the Editor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Region Key. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
NEW FEATURE: How much
should drugs cost? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Biometrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
JABES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Special Contribution of Biometrical Journal.7
New President: Elizabeth E. Thompson. . . . 7
Software Corner: Parallel computation in R. 9
Region News. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Australasian Region. . . . . . . . . . . 10
British & Irish Region. . . . . . . . . . 11
Dutch Region. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Eastern Mediterranean Region . . 11
Eastern North American Region. . 13
German Region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Indian Region. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Italian Region. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Japanese Region. . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Western North American Region. 15
Announcements and News. . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Meetings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
in Biometrics and in JABES. Given the many
high-quality papers in our Society’s journals,
the members of the Committee that judge
papers for these showcase sessions have a
substantial task, and the papers they have
selected promise two excellent sessions.
We also have a number of sessions directed towards more junior members. The
Education Committee has been responsible
for the short courses, and for the first time in
a number of years we have four short courses with good enrollment in each. Additionally,
the very successful Statistics in Practice Session,
pioneered by the German Region, will occur
again; this time with two speakers from the
UK on the topic of meta-analysis.
Continued on p. 6
BIOMETRIC BULLETIN
ISSN 8750-0434
Copyright © 2016
International Biometric Society
Biometric Bulletin is published four times a year in
March, June, September and December for US$40 per year by the:
International Biometric Society
1444 I Street, NW, Suite 700 • Washington, DC 20005-6542 USA
Telephone: +1 (202) 712-9049 • Fax: +1 (202) 216-9646
Email: <ibs@biometricsociety.org>
Website: http://www.biometricsociety.org
The Biometric Bulletin is available to members of the Society as
part of their annual dues. The views of contributions to this publication should not be ascribed to the International Biometric Society.
Reproduction for commercial purposes is allowed if the source is
acknowledged.
Editor
Havi Murad, Biostatistics Unit, The Gertner Institute for Epidemiology
& Health Policy Research, Sheba Medical Center, Email: <HaviM@
gertner.health.gov.il>
Regional Correspondents
Joanna in ‘t Hout (ANed), Vanessa Cave (AR), Roland Langrock
(BIR), Hein Putter (Channel Network), Axel Benner (DR), Giota
Touloumi (EMR), Leslie McClure (ENAR), Mamadou Diedhiou
(GEth), Olayemi Oluwasoga (GNi), Zofia Hanusz GPol, Cornelia
Enachesu (GRo, Peter M. Njuho (GSAf), Wellington Mushayi GZim,
Anil Mathew (IR), Satoshi Hattori (JR), Esa Läärä (NR), Cecilia
Bruno (RArg), Sophie Vanbelle (RBe), Luzia Aparecida Trinca
(RBras), Novie Younger (RCAC), Anabel Forte (REsp), Robert Faivre
(RF), Livio Finos (RItl), Seung-Ho Kang (Rko), Dominik Heinzmann
(ROeS), Henry G. Mwambi (SUSAN), Megan Othus (WNAR),
Jialiang Li (SING), Dan Kajungu (GUgan), Agnes Ankomah (GGha),
John Mwangi (GKe), Njoku Ama (GBot), Cristian Meza (GCl), Katja
Ickstadt (CEN), Alia Sajjad (PKSTAN), Andrew Zhou (CHINA), Johny
Javier Pambabay Calero (ECU)
International Biometric Society Executive Board
President: Elizabeth Thompson, United States
Immediate Past President: John Hinde, Ireland
Secretary-Treasurer: James Carpenter, United Kingdom
Directors: Karen Brandeen-Roche, United States; Frank Bretz,
Switzerland; Krista Fischer, Estonia; Joel Greenhouse, United
States; Freedom Gumedze, South Africa; Tae Rim Lee, Korea;
Sharon-Lise Normand, United States; José Pinheiro, United
States; Paulo J. Ribeiro, Brazil; Alan Welsh, Australia; Ernst Wit,
the Netherlands; Andreas Ziegler, Germany
Editors of Biometrics
Yi-Hau Chen, Academia Sinica – Institute of Statistical Science,
Email: <yhchen@stat.sinica.edu.tw>
Michael J. Daniels, University of Florida, Email: <mdaniels@
stat.ufl.edu>
Marie Davidian (Executive Editor), North Carolina State
University, Email: <davidian@ncsu.edu>
Stijn Vansteelandt, University of Ghent, Email: <stijn.vansteelandt@ugent.be>
Editor of Journal of Agricultural, Biological and
Environmental Statistics (JABES)
Stephen T. Buckland, CREEM, University of St. Andrews, Email:
<steve@mcs.st-and.ac.uk>
International Business Office
Executive Director: Dee Ann Walker, CAE
Director of Education: Alphonsus Baggett, MEd
Director of Administration: Mik Bauer
From the Editor
Region Key
Dear Readers,
Regions
The 28th IBC is on our door step, and I am
very excited about the interesting varied
program. I plan to participate in the meeting
of the Committee on Communications and
to hold a meeting for the Biometric Bulletin
team: Regional correspondents, Software
Corner correspondents, etc. on Tuesday14:00
– 15:30. Updates from these meetings along
with my personal impressions from the
conference will be given in the next issue.
Anyone who has ideas for new corners in
the Bulletin, topics for the Special Feature
articles or for our NEW Software Corner can
write to me or approach me in Victoria! I’ll
be happy to talk to you.
In this issue I am happy to introduce Daria
Steigman, our professional correspondent.
I figured it would be nice to know who is
standing behind these interesting Special
Feature articles.The article for this issue is on
cost-effectiveness of drugs. The idea to write
an article on this topic arose when I heard
Daniel Goldstein, senior physician at the
Rabin Medical Center in Tel Aviv and adjunct
assistant professor at Emory University, gives
a guest lecture at the Gertner Institute. He
described a cost-effectiveness model to
factor medication and administration costs
with life expectancy, frequency and management of adverse effects and quality of life.
In this model incremental survival benefit
for each drug is calculated in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALY).
In the NEW Software Corner, Garth Tarr from
the Australasian Region has written an article
on Parallel computation in R. I have recently
programmed a Gibbs Sampling Markov Chain
in SAS UNIX using a multiple imputation
method for a complicated measurement
error problem, and it used a CPU of 22
minutes per one simulated data. Imagine running 200 simulations…. Parallel computations
could have saved me a lot of CPU time. I’ll be
happy to receive your responses to this article
and also ideas for future articles.
As you know we regularly include in the
Bulletin highlights and updates from two IBS
Journals: JABES and Biometrics. Occasionally,
we will include some updates from more
local journals of specific regions of IBS. For
example, in this issue we include a special contribution of the Biometrical Journal
(German and Austro-Swiss Regions) on
Reproducible Research. Editors of such local
journals are invited to contact me and suggest special contributions from their journals.
Biometric Bulletin
2
RArg - Argentinean Region
AR - Australasian Region
ROeS - Austro-Swiss Region
RBe - Belgian Region
GBot - Botzwanian Region
RBras - Brazilian Region
BIR - British and Irish Region
RCAC - Central American-Caribbean Region
GCI - Chilean Region
CHINA - Chinese Region
EMR - Eastern Mediterranean Region
ENAR - Eastern North American Region
ECU - Ecuadorian Region
GEth – Ethiopian Region
RF - French Region
DR - German Region
GGha - Ghanian Region
IR - Indian Region
RItl - Italian Region
JR - Japanese Region
GKe – Kenyan Region
RKo - Korean Region
GMal - Malawi Region
GNi – Nigerian Region
NR - Nordic-Baltic Region
PKSTAN – Pakistani Region
GPol – Polish Region
GRo – Romanian Region
SING – Singaporean Region
GSaf – South African Region
REsp - Spanish Region
ANed - The Netherlands Region
GUgan – Ugandan Region
WNAR - Western North American Region
GZim – Zimbabwean Region
Networks
CEN - Central European Network
CN - Channel Network
SUSAN - Sub-Saharan Network
I would like to thank the outgoing president
of IBS, John Hinde. John attended the EMR
conference in Cappadocia Turkey during my
presidency, and I appreciate his good advice
and contribution to IBS. John has kindly
agreed to interview the new President,
Elizabeth E. Thompson, for this issue.
I will finish up by mentioning a “Statement
on Statistical Significance and P-Values” with
six principles underlying the proper use and
interpretation of the p-value, released by the
American Statistical Association (ASA) last
February in TAS. Although these issues have
already been discussed, this is the first time
that a community of statisticians as represented by ASA has issued a statement to address
these issues. The statement’s six principles are:
1.P-values can indicate how incompatible the
data are with a specified statistical model.
2.P-values do not measure the probability
that the studied hypothesis is true, or the
probability that the data were produced
by random chance alone.
3.Scientific conclusions and business or
policy decisions should not be based
only on whether a p-value passes a
specific threshold.
4.Proper inference requires full reporting
and transparency.
5.A p-value, or statistical significance, does
not measure the size of an effect or the
importance of a result.
Selected comments of IBS members on the
statement (all 22 comments appear in the
Supplemental of the original statement):
6.By itself, a p-value does not provide a
good measure of evidence regarding a
model or hypothesis.
1.Yoav Benjamini (EMR): http://errorstatistics.
files.wordpress.com/2016/03/benjamini.pdf.
Original statement: http://amstat.tandfonline.
com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154
108.
A brief outline: http://www.amstat.org/newsroom/pressreleases/P-ValueStatement.pdf.
2.Roderick J. Little (ENAR): https://s3-euwest-1.amazonaws.com/pstorage-tf-iopjsd8797887/4858042/15_Little.pdf.
3.Stephen Senn (Austro-Swiss): https://s3-euwest-1.amazonaws.com/pstorage-tf-iopjsd8797887/4858054/19_Senn.pdf.
Havi Murad
XXVIIIth International Biometric Conference
IBC 2016
2016 INTERNATIONAL BIOMETRIC CONFERENCE
July 10-15, 2016
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
The 2016 International Biometric Conference will feature a wide array of exciting
topics, including:
Biomarkers
Complex study designs
Correlated data
Electronic medical records
Fisheries
Forensic statistics
Genomics and other omics fields
Human rights
Network analysis
Neuroimaging
3
Nonparametric and semiparametric statistics
Missing data
Observational data and causal inference
Pharmarcokinetics and pharmacodynamics
Reproducible research
Spatio-temporal statistics
Statistics in science
Biometric Bulletin
Meet Our Professional Correspondent,
Daria Steigman!
Daria Steigman is an entrepreneur, writer, and founder of marketing / PR consultancy Steigman
Communications. As a contributor to Biometric Bulletin, she is charged with taking research and
explaining how its application matters to the broader public and policy conversations around public
health, the environment, and other bioscience disciplines.
New Feature:
How Much Should Drugs Cost?
Exploring the cost of prescription drugs – and their value to patients.
By Daria Steigman
Anyone who pays retail for health care in the United States knows
that there is no set fee for service. There are prices negotiated by
individual insurers, the price negotiated under Medicare, and what
each provider would love to charge in a perfect world. That’s the
high price of retail—for people with giant deductibles and those
without insurance.
Sometimes you can “shop” for a service (or negotiate a “discount”
later), but most of the time the retail patient is just a powerless
buyer in a seller’s market.
The arbitrary price of health care services came into sharp focus for
many Americans last fall when Martin Shkreli, aka “the pharma bro,”
overnight raised the price of Daraprim (used to treat toxoplasmosis) from $13.50 to $750 per pill. At the time, Shkreli told CBS News*
that “at this price it’s a reasonable profit. Not excessive at all.” Which raises the question: how much should prescription
drugs costs?
It’s not an easy question. Just start talking about cost and value,
and you have some people thinking that it’s all about how much
it’s “worth it” to keep someone alive. On the flip side, patients are
spending billions of dollars on drug treatments that may or may
not prolong live—with often-devastating side effects that massively reduce patients’ quality of live.
To understand the question, Biometric Bulletin talked with two
researchers who are exploring the pricing and cost-effectiveness
of oncology drugs.
A Framework for Value-based Pricing
Daniel Goldstein, senior physician at the Rabin Medical Center in
Tel Aviv and adjunct assistant professor at Emory University, has
been studying cancer drugs. He told Biometric Bulletin that the
prices have skyrocketed—without any link to their effectiveness.
Goldstein says that the drug development and approval process
in the U.S. is missing a key step: the evaluation of cost and value.
To address this missing link, he and his fellow researchers at Emory
University created a framework for establishing a value-based price
for new cancer drugs entering the market. It is a cost-effectiveness
model that factors in medication, administrative costs, life expectancy,
frequency and management of adverse effects, and quality of life.
Goldstein says that physicians are making a mistake when they
don’t take cost into account. “This is an issue for doctors,” he says.
“We have to be sensitive to the patient’s right, and the cost and
benefit when one is a lot higher.”
While the current model is focused on the U.S. market, Goldstein
and his colleagues are now turning their attention to creating models that look at the cost of drugs in different countries (including
Canada, Australia, England, Israel, South Africa, India, and China).
Comparing Treatment Options
While Daniel Goldstein is looking to build a broad framework,
Simon Zeichner looked specifically at the cost effectiveness of
three immune therapies used in the treatment of metastatic melanoma (ipilimumab, nivolumab, and pembrolizumab). The study
looked at the survival curves from the previously published phase
3 trials that included patients with metastatic melanoma and compared the different sequencing of these drugs.
Zeichner told Biometric Bulletin that many of the new immune
therapies are associated with an unprecedented number of patients
experiencing severe immune-related adverse effects. To understand
the options and many variables involved in such an analysis, Zeichner
and his colleagues built a comprehensive software model that
allowed them to input the costs of all aspects of oncologic care (e.g.,
infusions, doctor visits, drugs, treatment of adverse effects, hospitalizations). In order to gauge patient quality of life, they also incorporated
previously published health utility values (from patient survey data)
for each disease state and adverse effect.
The model is, says Zeichner, “one of the most comprehensive
cost-effectiveness models to date.”
Take ipilimumab, a CTLA-4 inhibitor, as an example. The drug was
recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) to prevent disease recurrence in patients with locally
advanced melanoma that has been completely surgically removed,
but at a dose (three times as much for a 70 kg. patient) and treat-
Biometric Bulletin
4
ment period (three years vs. three months) that far exceeds what
is FDA-approved for use in patients with metastatic melanoma.
FDA approval compared ipilimumab to a placebo rather than to
interferon alpha 2b, the previous standard of care.
Zeichner’s model demonstrates that the higher dose is associated
with a significantly greater cost (estimated at more than $1.4 million
for the drug alone—not counting doctor visits, scans, infusion costs,
treatment of adverse effects, or hospitalizations). It also suggests that
the lower dose is not only equally effective but also better tolerated
by patients.
More important, both Zeichner’s and Goldstein’s research are
about getting the best “bang for the buck” when it comes to
health care spending. While pharmaceutical companies are
looking for ways to maximize their profits, the heavy lifting is
left to health economics researchers to develop cost-effectiveness models to understand the “right” cost and value—and the
best and most cost-effective ways to treat patients for the least
amount of toxicity, cost, and more. That’s where science and
statistics can help insurers and policymakers frame the debate
for what is, inevitable, always going to be a tough conversation.
In addition, Zeichner’s model demonstrates that the higher dose
is associated with significant toxicity. During the arbitrary threeyear treatment period used in the phase 3 trial, more than half
of the patients who received ipilimumab had to discontinue
treatment as a result of adverse effects (some of which were
associated with significant morbidity and required lifelong treatment). Zeichner added that the study that formed the basis for
*CBS News citation: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/turing-pharmaceuticals-ceo-martin-shkreli-defends-5000-percent-price-hike-ondaraprim-drug/
Biometrics
September 2016 Issue Highlights
Papers in the September Biometric Methodology section include “A
flexible ratio regression approach for zero truncated capture-recapture counts,” by Dankmar Boehning, Irene Rocchetti, Marco Alfo, and
Heinz Holling; “Spatial regression with covariate measurement error:
A semi-parametric approach,” by Md Hamidul Huque, Howard D.
Bondell, Raymond J. Carroll, and Louise M. Ryan; “Model selection
and inference for censored lifetime medical expenditures,” by Brent
A. Johnson, Qi Long, Yijian Huang, Kari Chansky, and Mary Redman;
“An information-theoretic approach for the evaluation of surrogate
endpoints based on causal inference,” by Ariel Alonso, Wim Van der
Elst, Geert Molenberghs, Marc Buyse, and Tomasz Burzykowski; and
“Interpretable functional principal component analysis,” by Zhenhua
Lin, Liangliang Wang, and Jiguo Cao.
The Biometric Practice section features papers spanning a diverse
range of application areas, including “Model assessment in dynamic
treatment regimen estimation via double robustness,” by Michael P.
Wallace, Erica E. M. Moodie, and David A. Stephens; “Estimation and
interpretation of heterogeneous vaccine efficacy against recurrent
infections,” by Juha Mehtala, Ron Dagan, and Kari Auranen; “Unbiased
estimation of biomarker panel performance when combining training and testing data in a group sequential design,” by Nabihah Tayob,
Kim-Anh Do, and Ziding Feng; “Global rank tests for multiple, possibly censored, outcomes,” by R. Ramchandani, D. A. Schoenfeld, and D.
M. Finkelstein; and “An efficient design strategy for logistic regression
using outcome- and covariate-dependent pooling of biospecimens
prior to assay,” by Robert H. Lyles, Emily M. Mitchell, Clarice R.
Weinberg, David M. Umbach, and Enrique F. Schisterman.
As always, lists of papers to appear can be found at the Biometrics
website. Papers to appear in future issues may also be found under
the “Early View” link at the Wiley website, which may be accessed by
IBS members by visiting http://www.biometricsociety.org/, selecting
“Biometrics” from the drop-down menu at the “Publications” link at
the top of the page, and accessing the “Click here” link.
Biometrics Showcase Session at IBC2016
The Biometrics Showcase Session at the IBC in Victoria will be held
Tuesday, 12 July, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm. As reported in a previous col5
umn, the session will feature presentations of the two winners of
the Best Paper in Biometrics by an IBS Member Awards for 2014 and
2015, “Bayesian nowcasting during the STEC O104:H4 outbreak in
Germany,” by Michael Hohle and Matthias an der Heiden, published
in the December 2014 issue, presented by Dr. Hohle; and “Handling
missing data in matched case-control studies using multiple imputation,” by Shaun R. Seaman and Ruth H.Keogh, published in the
December 2015 issue, presented by Dr. Keogh. The authors will
receive the awards at the IBC Award Ceremony that same evening.
Editorial Board News
Co-editor Yi-Hau Chen’s term will end 31 December 2016. According
to geographic convention, the new Co-editor (CE) should reside outside of Europe or North America. A Search Committee has been
appointed according to IBS Policies and Procedures, which state that
the Committee should include the Chair of the Editorial Advisory
Committee (EAC), two members of the EAC, the Biometrics
Executive Editor, and the current Biometrics Co-editors. The committee members are: Marie Davidian, Biometrics Executive Editor, Chair
(ENAR); Esa Läärä, EAC Chair (Nordic Baltic Region); Liliana Lopez
Kleine, EAC member (Central America-Caribbean Region); Julio M.
Singer, EAC member (Brazilian Region); Yi-Hau Chen, Biometrics CE
(Chinese Region/At-Large); Stijn Vansteelandt, Biometrics CE (Belgian
Region); and Mike Daniels, Biometrics CE (ENAR). The committee
has identified a nominee; the new CE will be announced in a future
column upon approval of the nomination by the IBS Executive Board.
News from Our Publisher
Through an initiative of our publisher, Wiley, Biometrics will begin
participating in the peer-review recognition program Publons. Publons
(https://publons.com/) works with reviewers, publishers, universities,
and funding agencies to turn peer review into a measurable research
output. Specifically, Publons collects peer-review information from
reviewers and from publishers and produces comprehensive reviewer profiles with publisher-verified peer-review contributions that
referees can include in their promotion and funding applications.
In Fall 2015, Wiley piloted Publons with several Wiley journals and
received positive feedback from referees. Wiley has now offered this
opportunity to all of its society-owned publications.
Biometric Bulletin
Reviewers for Biometrics will be able to opt to use Publons to track
and verify their peer review activity through our ScholarOne editorial
management system. We welcome feedback from our referees on
this program. Please send comments to biometrics@tibs.org.
Wiley has provided the IBS with its 2015 Publisher’s Report for
Biometrics. Some highlights: Over 5,200 institutions purchased access
to Biometrics worldwide in 2015 through either a Wiley license or
traditional single-title subscription, compared with about 4,600 in
2014. Over 5,400 institutions in the developing world now have
access to Biometrics through free or low-cost subscriptions. Article
downloads increased by 4% over 2014, and the average number of
downloads per article was 44, with some articles being downloaded
over 1,000 times. Over 2,700 individuals worldwide are registered to
receive automatic alerts of new Biometrics content.
Journal of Agricultural, Biological,
and Environmental Statistics
(JABES) Editor Report
We continue to see a healthy number of papers coming through
the system. Following 12 papers in the March issue, a further
10 papers appeared in the June issue. The topics of these articles were: “Nonresolvable Row–Column Designs with an Even
Distribution of Treatment Replications”; “A Comparison of SuperValid Restricted and Row–Column Randomization”; “Estimability
Analysis and Optimal Design in Dynamic Multi-scale Models of
Cardiac Electrophysiology”; “A Nonlinear Mixed-Effects Model for
Multivariate Longitudinal Data with Dropout with Application to HIV
Disease Dynamics”; “Randomly Truncated Nonlinear Mixed-Effects
Models”; “A Bayesian Superpopulation Approach to Inference for
Finite Populations Based on Imperfect Diagnostic Outcomes”; “The
Micro-behavioral Framework for Estimating Total Damage of Global
Warming on Natural Resource Enterprises with Full Adaptations”;
“Categorising Count Data into Ordinal Responses with Application
to Ecological Communities”; “Using Species Proportions to Quantify
Turnover in Biodiversity”; and “Measuring the Inspectorate: Point and
Interval Estimates for Performance Indicators”.
The Special Issue on “Space-time Analysis of Natural or
Anthropogenic Catastrophes”, edited by Jorge Mateu and Emilio
Porcu, is nearing completion.
For more information on upcoming issues, the editorial board, and
the aim and scope of the journal, please visit our website http://link.
springer.com/journal/13253. We also accept submissions of books to
review in the upcoming issues of JABES; to submit a book for review,
please see the above website (click on “Editorial Board”), or contact
Ken Newman (ken_newman@fws.gov).
Steve Buckland
Editor in Chief
President’s Corner
Continued from p. 1
Last but not least, we have our Young Statisticians’ Showcase Session.
Yet another committee had the hard task of selecting five papers
out of more than 50 submitted. The five winners who will give their
oral presentations are chosen to represent the five major continental
regions, so most will travel a long way to Victoria. So that they and
other younger members can not only enjoy their week in Victoria
but also perhaps make more lasting contacts with each other, yet
another team of participants (some recruited from among younger
registrants) are setting up communication links and preparing activities directed towards the younger generation. As we are all well
aware, it is on involvement of the next generation that the ongoing
health of our Society ultimately depends.
And finally our local hosting Region, WNAR, has combined its own
annual meeting into the IBC. WNAR has its own exciting schedule of
sessions, including the Young Statisticians’ Papers Competition with 23
competitors! So their members have been doubly busy, not only with
the LOC but also with their own meeting arrangements.
So it is clear that many of you have been involved, at many different
levels, and to all who have contributed, I give my sincere thanks. We
are a volunteer Society and dependent on the commitment and
enthusiasm of our members. Thanks go also to all who organized
sessions, to those who will speak in those sessions, to others who
are preparing their oral presentations or posters and to those who
will come and participate in any way. Together we can look forward
to another successful and thoroughly enjoyable IBC.
Elizabeth Thompson
The Invited Session at this year’s International Biometric Conference in
Victoria, Canada will feature two papers that won best paper awards.
For 2014, the award went to Gurutzeta Guillera-Arroita, Martin
Ridout and Byron Morgan for their paper on “Two-stage Bayesian
Study Design for Species Occupancy Estimation”, and the 2015 award
winners were Gustavo de los Campos,Yogasudha Veturi, Ana Vazquez,
Christina Lehermeier and Paulino Pérez-Rodriguez, whose paper on
“Incorporating Genetic Heterogeneity in Whole-genome Regressions
using Interactions” appeared in the genomics special issue.
We are keen to publish papers that summarize the state of methodological development in subject areas for which technological
advances are generating a demand for new statistical approaches. If
such papers also speculate on likely future developments, so much
the better. If you feel that you could offer such a paper or can suggest
a topic together with possible authors, I would be very pleased to
hear from you. I would also welcome suggestions of topics for which
change is sufficient to merit a set of papers suitable for a special issue.
Biometric Bulletin
6
A Special Contribution of the Biometrical Journal
(Published by the German & Austro-Swiss Regions)
Reproducible Research
At the 61st Biometrisches Kolloquium, last year’s annual meeting of the
German Region (DR) organized by the Faculty of Statistics, Technical
University Dortmund, a tutorial on ‘Reproducible Research’ was held.
The course aimed at giving insight into the role of ‘Reproducible
Research’ for biometry and the work of biometricians, to communicate the principles of reproducibility in applied biometrical research
and to teach the participants literate programming, including Sweave
und knitr embedded in RStudio.This included training in project management software such as Subversion (SVN) and Git/GitHub (http://
benjaminhofner.de/talks.html). ‘Reproducible Research’ has been a
theme of the DR for some time; the ‘Reproducible Research’ initiative accounts for the paradigm that scientific results are incomplete,
if not useless, if they cannot be reproduced and replicated. Regarding
biometrical science, the tutorial in 2015 closely linked that paradigm
with the replication of biometrical data analyses, both, when statistical
methods are applied to real data, as well as when they are examined
in computer experiments and simulation studies. As a consequence
publications on biometrical methodology and biometrical practice in
life sciences including medicine, environmental sciences and agriculture should be accompanied by all relevant material to reproduce the
results and findings such that researchers can verify those and build
upon them.This request does have a direct impact on the publication
policy of journals publishing in biometry and biostatistics. Most journals support now reproducible research by providing data and program codes as supplementary material. However, ways of submission,
degree of examination of that material and details of communicating
those in publications reporting differ widely.
to ‘Reproducible Research’ since 2009, see Hothorn T., Held L. and
Friede T. (Biometrical Journal 51, 553-555).Thereby, authors are strongly
encouraged to submit computer code and data sets as used in their
manuscript. After verification that these materials reproduce the presented analysis, these will be published as Supporting Information on the
journal’s webpage once the paper has been accepted for publication.
Recently, B. Hofner, M. Schmid and L. Edler (2016) published a review
and guidelines on ‘Reproducible Research’ in statistics in the Biometrical
Journal (DOI:10.1002/bimj.201500156), with special consideration of
the current practice used for the journal.They reviewed the experience
of the past six years realizing that the number of manuscripts with
‘Reproducible Research’ material has increased by a factor of about
four since 2009. However, they also noted that the code submitted as
Supporting Information was of insufficient quality in more than half of the
papers at first place. Often the code could not immediately be executed, and prominent issues were missing, incomplete, and/or erroneous
code, failing to reproduce all tables and figures of the paper and, to a less
extent, also the programming style. Striking was also the high portion
of submissions missing a README file. Therefore, Hofner et al. (2016)
provide information which should equip authors with a comprehensive
guidance to comply with ‘Reproducible Research’ when submitting
papers to a biometric or biostatistical journal. The specific guidance for
the Biometrical Journal is available at the journal’s website (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%291521-4036/homepage/
RR_Guideline.pdf). While it is used by the ‘Reproducible Research’
Editor and his team who check each paper after acceptance, this
guidance together with the review paper might help to propagate
‘Reproducible Research’ in general.
The Biometrical Journal, http://www.wiley-vch.de/publish/en/journals/
alphabeticIndex/2221/, published by Wiley in cooperation with the
German and the Austro-Swiss Region of the IBS has committed itself
Benjamin Hofner, Erlangen; Matthias Schmid, Bonn; Lutz
Edler, Heidelberg
IBS New President:
Elizabeth Thompson
Interview by John Hinde (Outgoing
President)
John: Elizabeth, congratulations on your appointment as President of
the International Biometrics Society. We can talk more about the IBS in
a moment, but perhaps first we can discuss how you became interested in statistics. I notice that your first degree, like mine, is in mathematics,
so what attracted you to statistics and how did you get started?
Elizabeth: Well, I come from a family of mathematicians and so mathematics was the natural thing to do.There was almost no statistics in the
Cambridge math trips in the late 60’s, but I enjoyed what there was,
especially the probability models and stochastic processes. But, I also
had a general interest in genetics from a very early age, almost as young
as I can remember. For example, I was interested in coat colors of
black and yellow Labrador dogs, which we had, and during high school
I did a project where I first encountered estimating allele frequencies
for recessive traits. In addition, the fact that my mother, whose parents
were second cousins, has a very rare recessive condition also attracted
me to genetics. So I saw statistics as a way to combine mathematics
and genetics.The Genetics was always the driving force to do Statistics.
7
Members of the new IBS Executive Board meet in Nijmegen, the Netherlands (April 2015). Elizabeth Thompson and John Hinde are standing in
the middle of the front row.
Biometric Bulletin
What about the future? What do you see as exciting, productive areas
of research in the next few years?
In genetics, the data have changed dramatically in the last 45 years,
from working with blood and enzyme markers to DNA markers that
gave us genetic maps (first huge change happened in 1980) and now
we have DNA sequence data in huge amounts. . So, although the basic
questions are still the same – what are the genes, what do they do, and
how do they do it – we are now far less dependent on the traditional
genetic models and data structures and we can answer questions from
population data that we could only dreamt about a few years ago. This
change is going to continue in the future, and therefore we are going to
need new approaches to address new types of data.
That is certainly true. Now most of your life you have had a teaching
position as well. How have your teaching, consulting, collaboration
and research linked together and influenced one another?
The combination of teaching and research is a big part of why I moved to
the States in the mid-80s. I actually did a post-doc in genetics at Stanford
and after that I was on the math faculty in Cambridge for 10 years, but
all my research collaborations were still in the States. So, for 10 years, there
really wasn’t a connection between my teaching and research. From its
founding here, the University of Washington Department of Statistics was a
leader in genuine statistical science collaborations and so when the opportunity came up I made the move and the ability to combine the teaching and
research was a big motivation – one that worked out well for me.
That leads me nicely to what I was going to ask next, on how the
climate may have changed for postgraduates and faculty starting out
today. Clearly, your putting together of teaching and research was
not entirely straightforward, but do you think that it is more difficult
for students today?
I think that getting into a field like genetics and other scientific fields is
much harder today than it was in the past, as there is so much more stuff
out there, so much more background.Those of us who grew up with a field
and learned it as it developed, as I did with statistical genetics, we were
really very, very fortunate. The huge mass of literature and science that’s
out there now is very daunting, I think, to students getting into any field.
Following on from that, do you have any advice for students considering a career in statistics? How they might think about approaching
it and getting into some area?
Students often ask whether there is a particularly good area, or good
topic, to work on from the point of view of their career and I always find
that very hard to answer, because really my only advice is that you have
to work on the problems that interest you. Nothing else is really going to
work out, you can’t put your whole mind and energy into what doesn’t
fascinate you. In research, thinking of the right questions, knowing what the
interesting questions are is key, is rather more important than thinking of
the answers. The answers will come if you have the right questions. So, you
really do need to be curious about what you are working on and then the
questions will come. Talking to the scientists in the area that really does
interest you is probably the way to go. For me that’s what worked.
Have there been people or events that have been particularly influential in your career, suggested lines of research, or whatever?
Scientifically, first of all my PhD advisor Anthony Edwards, who really got
me into statistical genetics, but not only for the statistical genetics but
also for his interest in the foundations of statistical inference, which I know
very much influenced my own thinking over the years. And others, really
they’ve been the statistical and mathematical population geneticists
that I’ve worked with - more senior people in the States, Jim Neel of the
University of Michigan and James Crow of the University of Wisconsin,
to name two. I first visited those two departments in 1975, while I was
a post-doc at Stanford, and both those visits really were transformative
events in the way that I then went on to do things.
Turning now to the Biometric Society, when did you first become a
member and why? Was there any particular reason that you felt it a
natural home to join?
I think that it was probably in 1972, or 73, and it was for the same reason that most students join societies, that my advisor, Anthony Edwards,
told me that I should. But it was a very natural thing to do. One of my
very first papers was a note in Biometrics published in 1972 and my
1974 Biometrics paper is one that is still cited. So the Biometric Society
really felt a very natural home to be in.
You have been a member for a good number of years, over this time
what has membership of the Society meant to you?
In terms of the scientific society, it is really the society that’s been everything
to me. It’s the one society that I have always identified with and participated
in, ever since I was a graduate student. The Biometric Society has always
been my primary affiliation, because of its broad biological scientific focus,
which again seems to correspond with my thinking. I have always found
the members of the Biometric Society and their scientific interests so much
more interesting to me than those of the straight statistical societies.
But being a society of this nature, with its link between biology and
statistics, isn’t without some difficulties. Do you see any great challenges that face the Society in the coming years?
I think, as with all scientific societies, it’s, paradoxically, harder in this digital age to maintain the same community and communication that we
used to do. One would think that the internet and digital communication
and the universal availability of scientific material, they are all good things
and one would hope that they would make life easier, but, in fact, in a
way they make it harder to hold societies together. The younger generation of scientists has grown up in a very different environment and they
don’t see the conferences and those individual interactions in the same
way. On top of that they are very busy, with many, many pressures, and
therefore they do not see the benefits of getting involved in the Society.
You’ve alluded to it already, in terms of this linkage between biology and
statistics. Do you see any other great strengths of virtues of the IBS?
Yes, well the disciplinary diversity is an enormous strength, but the second
is our geographic diversity. We are truly an international society with a
mission to enhance biometric science around the world and especially
in developing countries. So I really think that the strength of the Society
is in its regions, which vary so widely in size, in focus, and in resources.
Let me finish by exploring what you hope to do during your presidency? What will be your aims and objectives over the next year, or
so, for benefitting the Society and the biometrics community?
I think that those two things that I have mentioned are places where I
would really focus. First, the regions, to get even better communication
and collaboration within and among the regions and I think our Networks
Program, which the Society has started, can really help some of the
smaller regions to get together and perhaps have more impact. I think
that visits to the regional meetings by leading members of the Society are
something that we really want to do. That may help younger people in the
Biometric Bulletin
8
regions get enthusiastic, not only about their own region, but about the
broader Society. Short courses and other education events in the developing countries are also a very big part of that. So, that’s the regional and
geographic side, and then I hope to try, and I know that this has been
something that other Presidents have also worked on, to maintain the scientific diversity and the balance of the science in the society. Sometimes,
the better funded clinical, epidemiological, health sides seem to dominate,
in some of the regions at least. Agriculture is also key in many parts of the
world and I think that ecology and environment are important to all of us
and I think that the Biometric Society is what it is because of its scientific
diversity. We gain so much by keeping a broad scientific perspective.
Elizabeth, thanks very much for your time, the interesting discussions that we have had and your vision for the Society. All that
leaves me to say is that I hope that you enjoy your term of office
as much as I did mine.
Thank you John and thanks for all of the advice that you have given
me as I start out on this road.
Software Corner
Parallel computation in R
Garth Tarr
Parallel computing refers to situations where calculations are carried
out simultaneously, for example distributing the calculations across
multiple cores of your computer’s processor, as opposed to having
the calculations run sequentially on a single core. Parallel computing
is particularly suitable for ‘single program, multiple data’ problems, for
example in simulations and bootstrapping.
Parallel computation in R has come a long way over the last 10
years. If you tried to parallelise your R code a few years ago, you
probably worked with the architecture specific snow (Windows) or
multicore (Unix-like) packages. Since 2011 R has supported parallel
computation as part of the base distribution with introduction of the
parallel package (R version 2.14.0 released in October 2011). The
parallel package builds on multicore and snow to provide a (mostly)
platform agnostic method of leveraging multiple cores to speed up
the computation of embarrassingly parallel problems.
This note discusses how to use parallel and associated packages, with
little or no additional effort on the part of the statistical practitioner,
to speed up data processing and statistical analysis pipelines.
Getting Started
The parallel package is part of base R which means that it’s already
installed and you can’t find it on CRAN. You can load it in the usual
way library(“parallel”). The first thing you’ll want to do is detectCores() which checks how many cores you have available wherever
R is running (probably your laptop or desktop computer).
Parallel Apply
The family of apply functions (apply, lapply, tapply, sapply, etc.) in R
provide an extremely convenient way of applying a function to the
margins of an array, matrix, list, etc. If you’re using apply on a data
frame, e.g. apply(X,2,median) to compute the median of the columns
of X, you should consider using lapply instead because it’s much faster,
e.g. lapply(X,median) which computes the median of each variable in
the data frame X (there’s no need for a margin argument). The apply
functions operate serially, i.e. they calculate each value in sequence
and are constrained to use only one of your computer’s cores.
9
If you’re on a Unix-like system, the mclapply function is an easy
way to distribute the computation across the available cores. To use
mclapply, first code your calculations as a function that can be called
with lapply. Make sure it works serially using lapply and then use
mclapply to perform the computations in parallel.
library(«parallel»)
X <- data.frame(matrix(rnorm(1e+07), ncol = 200))
mclapply(X, median)
In this simple example, there is only a relatively minor speed
improvement. To get the most out of parallel processes, the functions to be run in parallel should be non-trivial. There is an overhead
associated with forking the process, so it is possible to slow your
code down with mclapply if the time taken to send the tasks out to
various cores takes longer than performing the task serially.
Windows can’t “fork” processes in the same way that Unix-like systems do. This means that you won’t see any improvements in speed
when using mclapply on a Windows machine. On the plus side, your
code won’t break - it will work as if you were simply using lapply.
Microsoft has announced plans to incorporate a Ubuntu image into
future releases of Windows 10 through a new infrastructure they’re
calling “Windows Subsystem for Linux”. This means you may soon
be able to run R in a native Unix-like environment (which supports
forking and hence mclapply) on Windows 10 machines.
Parallel Loops
An alternative to mclapply is the foreach function which is a little
more involved, but works on Windows and Unix-like systems, and
allows you to use a loop structure rather than an apply structure. To
use foreach you need to register a “parallel backend”, for example
using the doParallel package. The doParallel package acts as an interface between foreach and the parallel package. A simple example
of how this works is given below where we calculate a percentile
bootstrap confidence interval for a least absolute deviations (LAD)
regression parameter. In the code below, we resample a dataset
10,000 times and each time generate LAD regression coefficients.
library(«quantreg») # for quantile regression function rq()
data(engel) # the data set we’ll use
# help(engel)
# plot(foodexp ~ income, data = engel)
# fit1 <- rq(foodexp ~ income, tau = 0.5, data = engel)
# abline(fit1)
library(«foreach»)
library(«doParallel»)
cl <- makeCluster(2) # create a cluster with 2 cores
registerDoParallel(cl) # register the cluster
res = foreach(i = 1:10000,
.combine = «rbind»,
.packages = «quantreg») %dopar% {
# generate a bootstrap sample
boot_dat <- engel[sample(1:nrow(engel), replace = TRUE), ]
# fit the model
fit1 <- rq(foodexp ~ income, tau = 0.5, data = boot_dat)
# return the coefficients
fit1$coef
}
stopCluster(cl) # shut down the cluster
In the foreach() function we’ve specified that the results should be
combined using rbind (i.e. the rows will be bound together, where
the ith row is the LAD regression coefficients from the ith bootstrap
Biometric Bulletin
sample) and we’ve indicated that the quantreg package needs to be
loaded on each of the processes. The output is a matrix, that we’ve
called res, which consists of two columns and 10,000 rows. We obtain
a 95% percentile bootstrap by extracting the appropriate quantiles:
resdf <- as.data.frame(res)
quantile(resdf$income, probs = c(0.025,0.975), type = 1)
##
2.5%
97.5%
## 0.4679890 0.6137351
The for loop syntax is very similar to a regular for loop in R, except it
starts with foreach and uses the %dopar% function. If you use %do%
instead of %dopar% the loop is evaluated sequentially where one
CPU will run at 100% until the job is finished. In the above example
we asked for two cores to be used, hence with %dopar% both cores
will run at 100% until the job is done. This means that a %dopar%
loop running on two cores will finish in roughly half the time that it
would have taken to run on a single core. As an example, the code
above with 100,000 replications using %do% takes 3.0 minutes on
my computer whereas using %dopar% takes only 1.6 minutes. It’s not
exactly two times faster because of the computational overheads
involved in sending the tasks out to the different cores and collating
the results. For more details see the doParallel and foreach vignettes.
Distributed Computing
The function mclapply can only use the cores of one machine, i.e.
jobs can’t be distributed over several nodes of compute cluster.
One way to do this in R is to use the parLapply function which can
utilise the Message Passing Interface (MPI) system. For further details
see the Rmpi package. The doMPI package provides an MPI parallel
backend for the foreach package.
Other Considerations
Parallel random number generation: When bootstrapping
or performing simulation studies, it is desirable for each instance of R to
generate independent, reproducible pseudo-random numbers. If there
is an object .Random.seed in your R workspace that is then shared
with the worker cores, all your instances of R may inavertently run
identical simulations using identical “random” numbers. Alternatively, if
.Random.seed is not in the workspace, then you will have independent
streams of random numbers but it will not be reproducible.The parallel
package includes a random number generator designed to overcome
these issues. It can be enabled using RNGkind(“L’Ecuyer-CMRG”). See
the documentation of the parallel package for details.
Bioconductor: If you work with Bioconductor packages, you
should look into BiocParallel which provides modified versions of
functions optimised for parallel evaluation, tailored for use with
Bioconductor objects.
So the next time you think about leaving a simulation running on
your computer for the weekend, consider using mclapply instead of
lapply or rewriting that for loop as a foreach loop and have it run
overnight instead, or send it out to a supercomputer and have the
results within a couple of hours! 29 April 2016
Region News
Australasian Region (AR)
Alesha Hatton
Alesha is currently an honors student
at the University of Wollongong, where
she completed a Bachelor of Medical
Mathematics (Dean’s Scholar), graduating
with distinction. For her honors year,
Alesha is completing a project of the
analysis of age and growth of endangered,
juvenile green turtles using mixed models at the National Institute for Applied
Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA).
IBS-AR Student Scholarships
To help attract enthusiastic and talented students to career paths in
biometrics, the Australasian Region offers scholarships for suitably
qualified students who intend to undertake a fourth or honors year of
study, or a coursework Masters, in statistics, mathematical statistics, biostatistics, bioinformatics or biometrics. We are delighted to announce
the winners of this year’s highly contested award: Clayton D’Ath
(University of Waikato), Alesha Hatton (University of Wollongong)
and Amanda Wright (University of Sydney). Congratulations!
Clayton D’Ath
Clayton is in the last semester of his
undergraduate degree in statistics after
which he will begin his honors degree
on a yet to be decided project. Further
post-graduate study in a Masters or
PhD is becoming a greater reality for
him with the subtle encouragements
from his supervisor in the form of
emails containing links to PhD applications. Over the past summer
he had a studentship with AgResearch Ltd (New Zealand) where
he performed exploratory data analysis on GeoChip data for the
50 Pastures Project (http://www.soilmicronz.net/50-pastures-project.html). In his personal time he is an avid hiker and takes advantage of his height in netball and ultimate frisbee.
During January she attended the 2016 Australian Mathematical Science
Institute (AMSI) Summer School at RMIT University, completing a
subject in Complex Networks which had a largely practical emphasis
on analyzing network data from epidemiology and ecology, using mathematical and statistical techniques. In 2015 Alesha attended the AMSI
BioInfo Summer, a bioinformatics conference giving exposure to new
areas of research in epigenetics, translational genomics and proteomics.
This is a dramatically expanding area which Alesha hopes she can get
into when she finishes her honors.
Biometric Bulletin
Amanda Wright
Amanda completed her undergraduate
degree at the University of Sydney in
Animal and Veterinary Bioscience in
2009 and was awarded first class honors, investigating gene regulation in a
neurological disorder in dogs. Following
this, she began her PhD at the Garvan
10
Institute of Medical Research in 2010 to investigate molecular
mechanisms of cell loss in an Alzheimer’s disease model and was
awarded her PhD in 2014. She currently works as a Research
Officer at the Garvan Institute in order to investigate mechanisms
of neurodegeneration in a variety of disease models. During her
research career Alesha fundamentally believed that having a stronger
understanding of statistical design and analysis could strengthen her
scientific research, so she began a Masters of Medical Statistics at
the University of Newcastle in 2015. Alesha now aims to complete
her masters in order to consult scientists in statistical concepts and
research design and to carry out robust and reliable medical research.
for Cochrane. Richard described random-effects meta-analysis in the
modern era and through an amusing analogy with Homer Simpson
trying to jog, posed the question “Are we running before we can
walk?” Theo discussed more sophisticated methodology involving
generalized linear mixed models for random effects meta-analysis but
also said, “There is still a place for D&L methodology, since it works
well in larger meta-analyses and for any choice of effect measure.”
Finally Nan Laird led a short discussion about “How heterogeneity
can be a good thing” and gave an amusing example of a sign from
New Cuyama, where the population (562), ft above sea level (2150)
and “Established” (1951) were added to give 4663. This was a highly
heterogeneous dataset if ever there was one!
IBS-AR Travel Awards
The Australasian Region offer travel awards to assist outstanding
students and/or early career members to attend international
meetings of the society. We congratulate Garth Tarr, a lecture in
statistics at the University of Newcastle and Correspondent of the
Software Corner of the Biometric Bulletin, and Lee Yan (Jarod) Liang,
a PhD student at the University of Technology Sydney, who were
awarded travel grants to attend the XXVIIIth International Biometric
Conference in Victoria, Canada.
Australasian Applied Statistics Conference
Join us for AASC’16 and pre-conference workshops, being held from 28
November - 2 December 2016 at The Windsong Pavilion, Four Winds,
Barragga Bay, NSW, Australia.The themes of AASC 16 are “Big data and
innovative consulting, statistics in fisheries and ecology, statistical genetics
and modern approaches to smoothing complex data”. An exciting group
of invited speakers will help explore this theme in various contexts.
Bermagui is quoted as a “Destination that borders on perfection”. It is
world renowned for its natural beauty and unspoiled beaches and forests. It offers a unique and exciting range of tourist attractions and is
the gateway to the northern entrances to the Sapphire Coast of NSW.
For more information visit: http://aasc.org.au/.
Vanessa Cave
British & Irish Region (BIR)
30-year Anniversary Meeting of DerSimonian & Laird
On Wednesday, 13 April, a celebration was held to mark the 30th
anniversary since the publication of the landmark paper “Metaanalysis in clinical trials” by DerSimonian & Laird (1986, Controlled
Clinical Trials 7, 177-188). The paper is one of the most highly cited
research publications. This paper introduces the now standard random-effects model for meta-analysis, a variety of estimation methods
and successfully applies these to a variety of real datasets.
The celebration brought together statistical scientists from across the
world and included talks by Dr. Julian Higgins (University of Bristol),
Dr. Kerry Dawn (University of Liverpool), Dr. Richard Riley (Keele
University) and Dr. Theo Stijnen (Leiden University Medical Centre).
It was a fantastic event for all involved, and was attended by both Nan
Laird and Rebecca DerSimonian. Julian Higgins introduced the paper
and described the history relating to it. He described the paper as “A
beautifully written paper with a wealth of extremely sensible discussion of meta-analysis” but also emphasised that it was “not without its
detractors!” Kerry discussed the impact of the paper on groups like
the Cochrane Collaboration and also described the exciting future
11
Nan Laird showing a heterogeneous dataset from New Cuyama.
Roland Langrock
Dutch Region (ANed)
Spring Meeting – Biostat’s Better Half, 24 June
2016, Leiden, the Netherlands
The next annual spring meeting, Biostat’s Better Half, promises to
be an entertaining event: in addition to the Dutch Region’s Annual
Meeting, Biostatistics’ Better Half will be presenting her latest research.
The keynote speakers will be Nicole Augustin (University of Bath),
Nan van Geloven (Leiden UMC), Helene Jacqmin-Gadda (University
of Bordeaux), Mar Rodriguez Girondo (Leiden UMC) and Sabine
Schnabel (Wageningen University). During the meeting, also the
Hans van Houwelingen Award for the best Dutch paper in a refereed
journal in the biometrical field in 2014 and 2015 will be awarded.
Registration is free. (https://forms.lumc.nl/lumc2/BMS)
Joanna in ‘t Hout
Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR)
Bulgaria
We are pleased to announce that a short course on Survival Analysis
will be held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia
University, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 18 – 20, 2016. The speakers are Laura
Antolini (Associate Professor in Medical Statistics, Department of
Medicine and Surgery) and Davide Bernasconi (Post-doctoral fellow
at the Department of Health Sciences) from the University of MilanoBicocca, Italy. The course is financially supported by the International
Biometric Society and is open to everyone interested free of
charge.There is no space limitation, but in order to attend the course
Biometric Bulletin
you need to register via the following registration form: http://goo.gl/
forms/AIsmZZXmQG1OKcms2. The deadline for registration is July 8,
2016. The tentative program of the short course is as follows:
Day 1 – 07/18/2016
• Features of survival data • Random variables and theoretical functions • Nonparametric estimation of hazard and survival functions
• Non parametric testing and sample size and power analysis
• R tutorials
Day 2 – 07/19/2016
• Competing risks data • Nonparametric estimation of hazard and crude incidence
functions
• Multistate data
• Nonparametric estimation of hazard functions and state
probabilities
• R tutorials
Day 3 – 07/20/2016
• Proportional hazard model: Cox model and fully parametric
models
• Check of assumptions
• Stratified Cox model
• Cox model with time varying effects
• Cox model with time varying covariates
• Fine and Gray model
• R tutorials
Practical computer classes in R are part of the course and some knowledge of R is preferable. If you have any inquiries (formal or informal),
please do not hesitate to contact the main organizer Denitsa Grigorova
(dgrigorova@fmi.uni-sofia.bg), the Bulgarian representative of the
Eastern Mediterranean Region of the International Biometric Society.
Greece
The EMR-IBS member and former Editor of the Biometric Bulletin,
Professor Ranny Dafni, was appointed to the Board of Directors of
the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (HCDCP)
(http://www.keelpno.gr). HCDCP has been really active lately during
the ongoing refugee crisis, overviewing vaccination programs and
disease control at refugee camps.
The 29th Annual Conference of the Greek Statistical Institute (http://
www.esi-stat.gr) has taken place in the town of Naoussa, Imathia
prefecture, Greece from May 4 – 7, 2016. The conference focused
on ‘Environmental Risk Assessment,’ but there were sessions covering
a wide range of statistical theory and applications topics. About 100
participants took part and also enjoyed the beauties and tastes of
this fabulous wine producing area of the Central Macedonia region.
Israel
The Israeli Statistical Association held its annual meeting in RamatEfal on May 19, 2016. There were about 200 participants from
universities, the industry and governmental offices in Israel, including members of the Israeli Biostatistics Forum (IBF). The Program
Committee included Dr. Yuval Nov (Chair) and Dr. Yair Goldberg
(Haifa University), Dr. Havi Murad (Editor of Biometric Bulletin,
Gertner Institute), and Prof. Sharon Rosset (Tel-Aviv University).
The day opened with a keynote talk by Prof.Trevor Hastie (Stanford
University) titled “Statistical Learning with Big Data”. There were a
variety of sessions. For example, Bioinformatics and Survival Analysis
(EMR-IBS sessions), which attracted members of the IBF. In many of
the talks in these sessions a topic that was mentioned in different
contexts was how to deal with the violation of two assumptions
simultaneously: (i) random sampling (for example in case-control
studies when you use ascertainment and sample more cases than
in the population, and (ii) independent observations (i.e when you
collect data on relatives from the same family). Other sessions
were Statistical Inference and Learning, Statistics and Public Policy,
Statistical Methods for the Analysis of Air Pollution Data, and a
Poster Session (with prizes). The meeting concluded with a panel
discussion on “Statistics and Data Science – Setting a New Course?”.
The panel included Professor Trevor Hastie (Stanford University),
Professor Avishai Mandelbaum (Technion), and Dr. Ronny Lempel
(VP Recommendations Group at Outbrain, an online advertiser
specializing in presenting sponsored website links). The panel was
moderated by Dr. Itai Dattner (Haifa University). The panel members discussed the statisticians’ roles in the big data era, how we can
become more dominant, and how it should affect our curriculum.
Panel discussants from left to right: Ronny Lempel (Outbrain), Avishai Mandelbaum (Technion), Trevor Hastie (Stanford).
A day after the conference, on May 20, Professor Hastie gave a four
hour workshop on “Statistical Learning and Data Science”.
Statistipedia – a competition on improving selected definitions in
‘Statistics and Probability’ from the Hebrew website of Wikipedia,
initiated by the Israeli Statistical Association 20.10.15 – 20.12.15. The
competition was open to students from all the faculties and also to
high school students. Two prizes of $520 and $775 were awarded to
the first two winners during the Israeli Statistical Association conference as well as 6 appreciation awards of $130 each.
Winners of Statistipedia.
9th EMR-IBS Conference Thessaloniki
The 9th Eastern Mediterranean Region – International Biometric
Society Conference will be held in Thessaloniki, Greece from 8–12
Biometric Bulletin
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May 2017. As always, we would like to bring together researchers
from around the world to this beautiful venue. The program will
include sessions from other regions of IBS, student travel awards,
invited talks and some pre-conference courses, as in previous EMR
meetings. Thessaloniki is considered an international city, a crossroad
of different civilizations, with historical sites related to all countries of
EMR. Thessaloniki is also a beautiful city with a combination of a lot
of different activities and sightseeing. The entire meeting is devoted
to the memory of Prof. Marvin Zelen (Harvard University), a keen
supported of EMR, who passed away in November 2014.
Symposium Honoring Prof. Marvin Zelen,
Thessaloniki, Greece
Frontier Science Foundation Hellas (FSFH), a non-profit organization,
is organizing a symposium to honor Marvin Zelen, Co-founder of
FSFH from 6–7 May 2017, adjacent to the 9th EMR-IBS Conference.
Frontier Science & Technology Research Foundation, Inc. (FSTRF)
and Frontier Science Scotland (FSS) are the Co-sponsors of the
symposium. Details will be posted at: www.frontier-science.gr.
Giota Touloumi
Eastern North American Region
(ENAR)
WebENAR
Be sure to check the ENAR Webinar website for updates regarding
the upcoming WebENAR series, as well as for links to past WebENAR:
http://www.enar.org/education/index.cfm.
2016 JSM 30 July-4 August, Chicago, IL, USA
The 2016 JSM will convene at McCormick Place in Chicago,
Illinois from 30 July–4 August. The theme of the 2016 meeting
is “The Extraordinary Power of Statistics”. ENAR has been
instrumental in helping to put together an outstanding program,
including sponsoring many sessions. These sessions include
invited presentations about analytics for personalized medicine,
integrative genomics, advances in spatial and spatio-temporal
data, cancer genomics, evaluating biomarkers for precision medicine, dynamic prediction in clinical survival analysis, dynamic
treatment regimes, big and complex data inference, enrichment
designs in clinical development, and challenges of analyzing
high-dimensional and big data. ENAR has also co-sponsored
many contributed sessions, as well as special presentations,
such as: introductory overview lectures (adaptive clinical trial
design, data science, casual inference, spatio-temporal data analysis), the ASA President’s Invited Address (“Science and News: A
Marriage of Convenience”, delivered by Joe Palca from National
Public Radio), the Deming Lecture (“Profound Knowledge from
a Knowledge Use Perspective”, delivered by Vincent P. Baraba
from Market Insight Corporation), the ASA President’s Address
(“Appreciating Statistics”, delivered by ASA President Jessica
Utts from UC Irvine), and the Fisher Lecture (“Personalizing
Disease Prevention: Statistical Challenges”, delivered by Allice
S. Whittemore from Stanford University School of Medicine).
New this year is the JSM Data Art Show, exploring the ar t in data.
ENAR received many proposals for invited and topic-contributed sessions, and thanks everyone who put for th an idea. ENAR
extends a huge thank you to Bin Nan from the University of
Michigan for serving on the Program Committee for the 2016
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JSM. For more details about the upcoming JSM meetings, please
see: https://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2016/index.cfm.
2017 ENAR Spring Meeting, 12-15 March,
Washington, DC, USA
The 2017 ENAR Spring Meeting will take place in Washington, DC, to
be held at the Washington Hilton.The Program Committee is soliciting
suggestions for invited paper sessions. Please suggest ideas and potential speakers and/or develop a formal proposal. Proposals on topics
that have broad potential scientific impact are particularly encouraged. Invited sessions are 105 minutes long, and different formats are
encouraged, such as sessions with four speakers, three speakers plus
a discussant, or a panel discussion. The invited session proposals will
be selected by the Program Committee, which includes the Program
Chair, Associate Chair, 15 ASA representatives of ASA sections, and
two ENAR at-large members. One participant may be a speaker/
panelist in at most one invited or contributed session. The deadline for
submission is 15 June 2016. Formal invited session proposals can be
submitted online through ENAR’s website. To informally suggest
ideas, topics or names of potential speakers, contact Nandita Mitra
(nanditam@mail.med.upenn.edu), Program Chair or Andrea Foulkes
(afoulkes@mtholyoke.edu), Associate Chair.
2017 JSM 29 July-3 August, Baltimore, MD, USA
The 2017 Joint Statistical Meetings will be held in Baltimore, Maryland,
and ENAR is fortunate to have Dionne Price be our representative
to the Program Committee. If you have ideas for the meeting, feel
free to contact Bin: Dionne.Price@fda.hhs.gov.
2018 ENAR Spring Meeting, 25-28 March, Atlanta,
GA, USA
Stay tuned for information about the 2018 ENAR Spring Meeting in
Atlanta, Georgia!
Leslie McClure
German Region (DR)
DAGStat 2016
The 4th Joint Meeting of the “Deutschen Arbeitsgemeinschaft
Statistik” took place from March 14 to 18, 2016 at the GeorgAugust-University of Göttingen and included the Biometric
Colloquium of the German Region (IBS-DR), the “Pfingsttagung”
of the “Deutschen Statistischen Gesellschaft” (DStatG) and the
Annual Meeting of the “Gesellschaft für Klassifikation” (GfKl). A
total of 709 statisticians from 25 countries came to Göttingen,
and again an increase in the number of participants was recorded
compared to the previous three meetings in Freiburg, Dortmund
and Bielefeld. The local organization was coordinated by the
Chairs of Statistics and Econometrics, together with the Centre
for Statistics of the University of Göttingen under the direction of
Thomas Kneib and Henriette Irmer.
From 451 submissions, a total of 368 oral presentations were
selected that could be assigned to 33 topics. Psychometrics, Machine
Learning, Bioinformatics and Big Data and Data Science were included for the first time into the program. The topics ‘Statistics in Clinical
and Preclinical Research’ and ‘Survival and Event History Analysis’
were the most favorable, each with eight sessions. Most of the 30
invited speakers were from outside Germany and they contributed
Biometric Bulletin
to the international and scientific quality of the program, as did the
over 100 international participants.
The Statistics Bazaar, firstly introduced to the DAGStat meetings in
Freiburg, was again an opportunity for early birds to learn about methods in an unfamiliar context. Among the 175 young scientists, especially
the beginners were supported in the Young Statisticians’ Session that
was jointly organized by the three Societies IBS-DR, DStatG and GfKl.
A marzipan competition (organized by Udo Rempe) promoted the
communication between the presenters by rating each other. Further
scientific exchange was encouraged at the Welcome Reception in the
historic rooms of the old refectory. Under the quote from Novalis,
Freiherr von Hardenberg “Even the coincidence is not unfathomable,
it has its regularity” the conference dinner was held in the Castle
Hotel in Nörten-Hardenberg. The awarding of the DAGStat medals
in a festive setting was embedded in lively scientific and non-scientific
exchange between the participants.The social program was completed by guided city tours, with special emphasis on Carl Friedrich Gauss.
In order to reach the public and provide information on statistical
topics, the meeting started off with a public lecture in the historic
building of the University Library, the Paulinerkirche. Ralf Wagner of
the University of Kassel spoke on the theme, “Yes, Made for Me” or
“Made from My Data!” - Targeting Customers in Interactive Marketing.
The IBS-DR chose two young scientists to present their master thesis
Young Statisticians’ Session: Anke Hüls (Chair), Moritz Hanke (IBS-DR),
Maria Umlauft (GfKL), Martin Happ (DstatG), Tanja Proctor (IBS-DR),
Benjamin Hofner (Chair) (from left to right).
and reimbursed their conference participation and the conference
dinner. In addition, IBS-DR awarded Susanne Steinhauser with the
Bernd Streitberg Prize and Stefan Englert with the Gustav Adolf Lienert
Prize. Both got the opportunity to present together with Andre
Burkovski (Best Paper Award from the GfKl) in the Awards Session.
Overall, the DAGStat Conference 2016 hopefully remains as a good
memory, so that we will again meet in 2019 in München. We
thank all supporters of the meeting and in particular the city of
Göttingen for the financial support of the Welcome Reception and
the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the program Pro
* Niedersachsen funded by Lower Saxony’s Ministry of Science and
Culture for the promotion of the scientific program of the meeting.
(Henriette Irmer, Thomas Kneib)
Axel Benner
Indian Region (IR)
Indiaclen Annual Conference
SRM University, Chennai organized the 2016 Annual Indiaclen
Conference March 11 – 12. Dr. K R John, Professor of Community
Medicine was the Organizing Secretary. The conference was inaugurated by Dr. N K Arora, Global Executive Director of Inclen
Network Trust. During the statistical session, Dr. Anil C Mathew,
Professor of Biostatistics spoke on “Cox proportional hazards
model, its characteristics and its application in clinical research”,
and Dr. Thambu David, Professor CMC Vellore spoke on “Evidence
based medicine”. The aim of the conference was to promote clinical epidemiology and improve the health in India.
Awards Session: Berthold Lausen (GfKL), Andre Burkovski (GfKL best paper
award), Susanne Steinhauser (Bernd Streitberg Price), Stefan Englert (Gustav Adolf Lienert Price), Tim Friede (IBS-DR) (from left to right).
The IBS-DR lecture series “Education for Statistics in Practice” was
held this year by Georg Heinze and Daniela Dunkler from the
Medical University Wien on Variable Selection for Statistical Models.
As in the previous years, the lecture has been a great success. Due
to the excellent experience, the series will be extended to the
International Biometric Conference. At the panel discussion, the Future
of Scientific Publishing was discussed, moderated by the Chair of the
panel, Karl Mosler.
The 72 posters, combined with a reception on the occasion of the
40th Annual Meeting of the GFKl, promoted scientific exchange in an
informal setting. This time, two rating systems rewarded the work of
the poster presenters. A consortium determined five poster authors
who obtained book vouchers generously donated by Springer Verlag.
Dr. Anil C Mathew delivering the invited talk Cox proportional hazards
model, its characteristics and its application in clinical research.
Biometric Bulletin
14
34th Annual National Conference Indian Society for
Medical Statistics (ISMS)
The 34th Annual National Conference Indian Society for Medical
Statistics is scheduled to be held from 1 – 3 December 2016 at the
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. For further details, you may contact
Prof. Saurabh Ghosh by emailing saurabh@isical.ac.in.
Anil C Mathew
Italian Region (RItl)
The Italian Region is strongly involved in promoting the education
in biostatistics to non-specialists, and for the next month we are
promoting two short courses:
1. Statistics Applied to Biomedical Research, organized by the
Italian Association of Medical Physics, 16 – 17 June 2016 at the
University Milano Bicocca and BiostAT2016.
2. XXIII Summer School of Statistical Inference in Biology and Human
Science, 28 June – 8 July 2016 at UNI-Astiss.
We are also working on our homepage, www.ibs-italy.org, which will
be set online 20 May 2016.
Livio Finos
Japanese Region (JR)
The 2016 Annual Meeting of the
Biometric Society of Japan
The 2016 Annual Meeting of the Biometric Society of Japan was held on
18-19 March, 2016 at Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tachikawa,
Tokyo, Japan, with 196 participants. The Biometric Society of Japan is
discussing establishing a certificate system for biostatisticians working
in clinical trials. A special session on the certificate system was held.
The working group for the certification system reported the current
progress, and several issues were discussed. In an invited session,
recent topics in statistical methods for pharmaceutical research
were discussed. The Biometric Society of Japan conferred the Young
Biostatisticians Award on Drs. Fumiaki Kobayashi (Daiichi Sankyo, Inc.),
Osamu Komori (Fukui University) and Akihiro Hirakawa (Nagoya
University) for their publications in Journal of Agricultural, Biological and
Environmental Statistics, Biometrics and Japanese Journal of Biometrics,
respectively. A tutorial session entitled “Introduction to statistical modeling: from the generalized linear model to the Bayesian hierarchical
models” was held with 106 participants.
The 2016 Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting
The winners of the Young Biostatisticians Award: Drs. Koyama (for Dr.
Kobayashi), Hirakawa and Komori (from left to right).
The Biometric Society of Japan is one of the six sponsoring organizations of the meeting, and the 2016 Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting will
be held on 4-7 September at Kanazawa University in Kanazawa, Japan.
The Biometric Society of Japan is organizing the Biometric Symposium
entitled “Statistical monitoring for quality control and assurance in clinical trials”. Recently, inappropriate handling of data in medical researches
has been a serious social issue in Japan. The symposium will cover
statistical methods for safety monitoring and fraud detection, which is
expected to be useful to detect distortion in data handling and analysis.
The Biometric Society of Japan is also organizing a session by the winners of the Young Biostatisticians Award conferred by the Society. Three
young statisticians will make a presentation on their research.
Satoshi Hattori
Western North American Region
(WNAR)
WNAR is the local host to the 2016 IBC, to be held in Victoria,
Canada from 10-15 July 2016. Meeting information is available at:
http://biometricconference.org. Details about WNAR sessions at
IBC and the WNAR student competitions will be posted on the
WNAR web page www.wnar.org as they become available.
Megan Othus
IBS on LinkedIn - Join Our Group & Get Connected to Colleagues
Across the Globe
IBS has created a LinkedIn Group for biometrics industry
professionals to become a part of…and network with
your colleagues instantaneously! Post discussions to the
Group and get comments/feedback from Group members on their perspectives or experiences. A great benefit
of this Group is that it’s a very easy and free way to communicate with
15
your colleagues who live all around the world. Being connected to the
IBS Group will allow you to see other connection possibilities as well
and broaden your professional network. The possibilities are endless.
Join our Group today by visiting www.linkedin.com, and search under
Groups for ‘International Biometric Society.’
Biometric Bulletin
MEETINGS
2016
24 June
28 November – 2 December
29 June – 1 July
1 – 3 December
Australasian Applied Statistics Conference (AASC’16)
Barragga Bay, NSW, Australia
http://aasc.org.au/
Spring Meeting – Biostat’s Better Half
Leiden, the Netherlands
Registration is free! (https://forms.lumc.nl/lumc2/BMS)
Summer School on Group Sequential and Adaptive
Study Designs
Strobl at the lake “Wolfgangssee”, Austria
34th Annual National Conference Indian Society for
Medical Statistics (ISMS)
Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
Prof. Saurabh Ghosh (saurabh@isical.ac.in)
28 June – 8 July
XXIII Summer School of Statistical Inference in Biology
and Human Science
UNI-Astiss, Italy
2017
10 – 15 July
12 – 15 March
XXVIIIth International Biometric Conference
Victoria, BC, Canada
http://biometricconference.org/
ENAR Spring Meeting
Washington, DC, USA
http://www.enar.org/meetings/index.cfm
18 – 20 July
8 – 12 May
9th EMR-IBS Conference
Thessaloniki, Greece
Short course on Survival Analysis
Sofia, Bulgaria (sponsored by EMR-IBS)
Registration is free! (http://goo.gl/forms/
AIsmZZXmQG1OKcms2)
Denitsa Grigorova (dgrigorova@fmi.uni-sofia.bg)
29 July – 3 August
Joint Statistical Modeling
Baltimore, MD, USA
Dionne Price (Dionne.Price@fda.hhs.gov)
July 30 – August 4
Joint Statistical Meeting
Chicago, IL, USA
http://www.enar.org/meetings/index.cfm
August 21 – 25
International Society for Clinical Biostatistics 38th
Annual Conference
Vigo, Spain
http://www.iscb.info/
21 – 25 August
International Society for Clinical Biostatistics 37th
Annual Conference
Birmingham, United Kingdom
http://www.iscb.info/
5 – 6 September
2018
2nd Workshop for Young Statisticians of the Spanish
Biometric Society
Barcelona, Spain
http://www.biometricsociety.net/ii-jornadas-cientificas-de-estudiantes-de-la-seb/
4 – 7 September
25 – 28 March
ENAR Spring Meeting
Atlanta, GA, USA
8 – 13 July
XXIXth International Biometric Conference
Barcelona, Spain
The 2016 Japanese Joint Statistical Meeting
Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan
Biometric Bulletin
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