Members of Mathematica's statistical team will be active in the coming months with a variety of professional activities and honors. In August, they will attend and present at the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings, where senior fellow Frank Potter will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). On September 9, our statisticians will host a half-day conference and webinar with the Washington Statistical Society focused on survey designs that use non-probability samples. In October at the 11th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics, Mathematica statisticians will teach workshops and present in scientific sessions about cutting-edge statistical methods and applications to solve problems in health policy. They will also participate in a number of other conferences this fall and winter.
Summer Conferences
Joint Statistical Meetings
At the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), Mathematica senior fellow Frank Potter will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, in recognition of his contributions to survey methodology and professional service. He will also present work on methods of weight trimming in sample surveys. Senior fellow John Czajka will serve as discussant in a session on "Poverty, Government Program Receipt, and Measurement Using Administrative and Survey Data" and will lead a roundtable discussion of "The Future of Public Use Data" for the Health Policy Statistics Section. Frank Yoon, associate director of data science and statistics, and senior statistician Mariel Finucane will present in an invited session about program and policy evaluation with Bayesian techniques. In addition, Finucane will present her paper about Bayesian density estimation with application to global childhood undernutrition, which was selected among top quality articles published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Several other Mathematica experts will present recent research findings at the conference, participate in research review sessions, and moderate panel discussions.
Mathematica staff also serve in leadership positions for the ASA. Diane Herz, vice president and director of survey research, will lead the business meeting for the Committee on Gay and Lesbian Concerns in Statistics, which she chairs. As program chair for the ASA Health Policy Statistics Section, Yoon will start planning for JSM 2016, "The Extraordinary Power of Statistics," to be held in Chicago.
Non-Probability Samples Conference
Mathematica and the Washington Statistical Society will host a conference and webinar on September 9 from 12:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. to examine conditions under which survey designs that do not use probability samples might still be useful for making inferences to a larger population. This session, hosted at Mathematica's Washington, DC, office, will focus on recent findings from the American Association for Public Opinion Research task force on the same topic. To attend this event or join via webinar, contact Alyssa Maccarone at amaccarone@mathematica-mpr.com or (202) 250-4570 before September 7.
Fall and Winter Conferences
Mathematica's statistics experts will also present at other fall conferences, exhibiting Mathematica's thought leadership in the application of Bayesian methods in policy research at several notable professional meetings. Finucane will present on novel Bayesian adaptive designs for rapid-cycle evaluation at the inaugural AcademyHealth Concordium in September, and at a big data workshop preceding the 2015 Fall Research Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Managementin November. Also in September, statistician Sheng Wang will present findings from an empirical Bayes application to hospital quality indicators at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Research Conference.
Mathematica statisticians will also present at the 2015 Total Survey Error Conference in September. Statistical analyst Alicia Haelen will present on "The Effects of Data Editing and Imputation on Total Survey Error of the National Survey of College Graduates." Senior statistician Nick Beyler will present on "Adjusting for Measurement Error and Nonresponse in Self-Report Physical Activity Surveys."
At the 11th International Conference on Health Policy Statistics in October, Finucane will lead ahands-on workshop on Bayesian models for health policy evaluation and also present on Bayesian methods for health policy evaluation along with Randy Brown, director of Mathematica's health research senior fellows. Also at this conference, Yoon will chair a session he organized about statistical methods and payment reform in health policy, which will include Mathematica senior fellow Eugene Rich as expert discussant.
Mathematica statisticians will round out the year with presentations at the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology conference to be held from December 1 through 3 in Washington, DC. Derekh Cornwell will present findings from a methodological study of statistical techniques for data validation with small sample sizes, which illustrates the tradeoffs of different techniques and will offer practical guidance on efficient validation designs. Principal program analyst Karen Cunnyngham will present a paper co-authored by senior fellow John Czajka and lead data analyst Randy Rosso about a comparative analysis of administrative and simulated data from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program using linked administrative and survey data.
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for updates from these events.