RAND Statistics Seminar Series

The RAND Statistics Group holds periodic seminars that are open to all RAND employees and members of the public. The chair of the seminar series is Matthew Cefalu. Members of the public who would like to attend should contact Emily Payne in advance.

If you would like to meet with any of the speakers, or request a paper, please contact Emily Payne.

Upcoming Seminars | Past Seminars

Upcoming Seminars

Please check back for future seminar announcements.

Past Seminars

A synthetic estimator to improve estimation of causal effects in clinical trials with noncompliance

Presented by Joseph (Joey) Antonelli, Harvard Biostatistics, Postdoctoral Fellow
Co-Sponsored by Center for Causal Inference (CCI)

Thursday, August 25, 2016
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, Washington, DC

Personalized Biostatistics, Small Data, and N-of-1 Trials

Presented by Naihua Duan, Columbia University, Division of Biostatistics, Department of Psychiatry

Thursday, October 10, 2016
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, Washington, DC

Multivariate Multilevel Models for Health Care Quality Data

Presented by Alan Zaslavsky, Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Care Policy (statistics)

Thursday, November 11, 2016
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, Washington, DC

Collaborative Double Robustness and The Connection to Data-Adaptive Nuisance Model Selection in Causal Inference

Presented by Mireille Schnitzer, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, University of Montreal

Thursday, March 10, 2016
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, Washington, DC

Principal stratification in the Twilight Zone: Weakly separated components in finite mixture models

Presented by Avi Feller, University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, May 19, 2016
Time: 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, Washington, DC

Estimating Causal Effects of Continuous Exposures

Presented by Donna Coffman, Research Associate Professor and Principal Investigator, The Methodology Center, Penn State University

Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and Boston

Explained Variation in Correlated Survival Data

Presented by Ronghui (Lily) Xu, UCSD/ Biostatistics and Bioinformatics

Thursday, July 23, 2015
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Proof in Medicine: The Contributions of Jerome Cornfield

Presented by Joel B. Greenhouse, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University

Thursday, June 18, 2015
Time: 1:30 PM Eastern
Host Location: Pittsburgh
Other Locations: Santa Monica & Washington, DC

Penalized and Constrained Regression

Presented by Gareth James, University of Southern California

Thursday, May 21, 2015
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Design and Estimation for Respondent Driven Sampling

Presented by Karl Rohe, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Statistics

Thursday, April 2, 2015
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica, room 1226
Other Locations: Pittsburgh (room 6202) & Washington, DC (room 4302)

Essential Ideas of Causal Inference in Experiments and in Observational Studies

Presented by Don Rubin, Harvard University, John L. Loeb Professor of Statistics

Tuesday, March 24th, 2015
Time: 12:00 – 1:00 PM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica, room 1226
Other Locations: Pittsburgh (room 6207a) & Washington, DC (room 4128)

Robust Mixed-effects Model for Clustered Failure Time Data: Application to Huntington's Disease Event Measures

Presented by Tanya Garcia, Texas A&M University

Thursday, November 20th, 2014
Time: 10:00 – 11:30 AM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica, room 5312
Other Locations: Pittsburgh (room 6202) & Washington, DC (room 6201)

Propensity Score Methods in the Context of Covariate Measurement Error

Presented by Elizabeth Stuart, Johns Hopkins
Tuesday, October 14th, 2014
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Eastern
Host Location: Washington, DC
Other Locations: Santa Monica & Pittsburgh, PA

A Gaussian Process Model for Estimating Within-Subject Volatility in Indices of Protein-Energy Malnutrition Among End-Stage Renal Disease Patients

Presented by Daniel L. Gillen, University of California, Irvine

Thursday, September 18th, 2014
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Adaptive Piecewise Polynomial Estimation via Trend Filtering

Presented by Ryan Tibshirani, Carnegie Mellon University

Wednesday, August 20th, 2014
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 PM Eastern
Host Location: Pittsburgh
Other Locations: Santa Monica & Washington, DC

Non-Local Priors for High-Dimensional Estimation

Presented by Donatello Telesca, University of California Los Angeles

Thursday, July 24th, 2014
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 Noon Pacific / 1:30 – 3:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Cardiovascular Event Risk Dynamics Over Time in Older Patients on Dialysis: A Generalized Multiple-Index Varying Coefficient Model Approach

Presented by Damla Senturk, University of California Los Angeles

Wednesday, May 21st, 2014
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 PM Pacific / 3:00 – 4:30 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Missing Data as a Causal Inference problem

Presented by Judea Pearl, University of California Los Angeles

Thursday, March 20th, 2014
Time: 10:00 – 11:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Estimating the Comparative Effectiveness of Screening Tests

Presented by Carolyn Rutter, The Group Health Research Institute

Wednesday, November 13th, 2013
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM Pacific / 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Exits on the Road to Serfdom

Presented by Dr. James Thompson, Noah Harding Professor of Statistics, Rice University

Thursday, September 26th, 2013
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific / 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Data-adaptive Approaches to Causal Effect Estimation

Presented by Dr. Debashis Ghosh, Professor of Statistics at Penn State University

Thursday, February 14th, 2013
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific / 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Systematic Approaches to Personalized Treatment Selection

Dr. Tianxi Cai - Professor of Biostatistics at School of Public Health, Harvard University

Monday, January 14th, 2013
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific / 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Modeling Networks When Data Is Missing or Sampled

Mark S. Handcock - University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Statistics

Thursday, October 11th, 2012
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific / 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Can We Trust the Third Significant Figure?

James Marshall Flegal - University of California, Riverside, Department of Statistics

Thursday, September 13th, 2012
Time: 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific / 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern
Host Location: Santa Monica
Other Locations: Pittsburgh & Washington, DC

Effect of multivariate outlier detection & imputation on poverty & inequality indicators

Beat Hulliger—University of Northwestern Switzerland, School of Business
Wednesday, July 25th, 2012, 12:00 - 1:00 PM PST
Host Location: Santa Monica, CA
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, PA, and Washington, D.C.

Sparse Nonparametric Bayesian Learning from Big Data

Dr. David Dunson—Dept. of Statistical Science, Duke University
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
Host Location: Santa Monica, CA
Other Locations: Pittsburgh, PA, and Washington, D.C.

Examining moderated effects of additional adolescent substance use treatment: Structural nested mean model estimation using inverse-weighted regression-with-residuals

Dr. Daniel Almirall— Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
Pittsburgh, PA

Tweedie's Formula and Selection Bias

Dr. Bradley Efron—Stanford University
Thursday, March 1st, 2012
Santa Monica, CA

Effective Semiparametric Modeling for Ultra-Sparse, Unsynchronized and Imprecise Longitudinal Data

Dr. Damla Senturk—UCLA
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
Santa Monica, CA

Sparse Functional Data with an Irregular Periodic Component: An Application to Psychiatric Data

Dr. Catherine A. Sugar—UCLA
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Santa Monica, CA

Multiplicative Algorithms: Why Do They Converge and How to Make Them Faster

Dr. Yaming Yu—UC Irvine
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
Santa Monica, CA

Modern Experimental Design Methods and How to Use Them

Dr. Douglas C. Montgomery—Arizona State University
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
Santa Monica, CA

What's New in Causal Inference: From Propensity Scores and Mediation to External Validity and Surrogate Endpoints

Judea Pearl—University of California, Los Angeles
Thursday, March 24th, 2011
Santa Monica, CA

Context Modeling for Detecting Cis-Regulatory Signals

Qing Zhou—University of California, Los Angeles
Wednesday, January 19th, 2011
Santa Monica, CA

Valued Ties Tell Fewer Lies: Why Not To Dichotomize Network Edges With Thresholds

Andrew C. Thomas, Visiting Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Pittsburgh, PA

Identification of Social Interactions

Steven N. Durlauf, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Pittsburgh, PA

The Importance of Scale for Spatial-Confounding Bias and Precision of Spatial Regression Estimators

Presented by Christopher Paciorek, Ph.D., University of California — Berkeley
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Santa Monica, CA

A Coverage Approach to Evaluating Mean Square Error

Alan H. Dorfman, Ph.D., Bureau of Labor & Statistics, Washington., D.C.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Pittsburgh, PA

Measuring HIV Incidence: Approaches and Challenges

Presented by Ron Brookmeyer, University of California, Los Angeles
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Santa Monica, CA

High Dimensional Classification Using Feature Annealed Independence Rules

Presented by Yingying Fan, Ph.D, University of Southern California
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Santa Monica, CA

Propensity Score Matching to Recover Latent Experiments

Presented by Ben B. Hansen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
Pittsburgh, PA

Exploring the Housing Crisis with ggplot2 and plyr in R

Presented by Hadley Wickham, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Rice University
Friday, November 6, 2009
Santa Monica, CA

Lessons from the Netflix Prize

Presented by Dr. Robert Bell, AT&T Labs-Research, Florham Park, NJ
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Santa Monica, CA

Using the Whole Cohort in Two-Phase Study Designs

Presented by Professor Thomas Lumley, University of Washington
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Santa Monica, CA

Data Large-Scale Prediction Problems

Presented by Professor Bradley Efron, Stanford University
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Santa Monica, CA

Everything is Dangerous: A Controversy

Presented by Stanley Young, Ph.D., Assistant Director for Bioinformatics, NISS Triangle Park, NC
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Pittsburgh, PA

Information, Knowledge, and Truth: Replacing Secrecy, Ignorance, and Myth in the Wake of Atrocity

Presented by Patrick Ball, Ph.D., Chief Scientist and Director, Human Rights Programs
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Pittsburgh, PA

Proxy Pattern-Mixture Analysis for Survey Nonresponse

Presented by Roderick J. Little, Ph.D., University of Michigan
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Santa Monica, CA

Accounting for Complex Sample Designs via Mixture Models

Presented by Michael Elliott, Ph.D., University of Michigan
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Santa Monica, CA

Visualizing Hierarchical Cluster Structure via Density-Based Linkage Methods and Component Trees

Presented by Rebecca Nugent, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University
Friday, November 21, 2008
Pittsburgh, PA

Data Assimilation for Epidemiologic Air Exposure Assessment

Presented by Ana G. Rappold, Ph.D., USEPA
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Santa Monica, CA

Statistics and Public Policy

Presented by David A. Marker, PhD, WESTAT, Rockville, MD
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Pittsburgh, PA

Analysis of Gene Expression Leukemia Data using Split-Merge Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Presented by Sonia Jain, Ph.D., University of California – San Diego
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Santa Monica, CA

Causal Inference for Randomized Trials of Two Active Treatments Subject to Non-compliance

Presented by Jason Roy, PhD, Geisinger Center for Health Research
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Pittsburgh, PA

Spectral Analysis of Faint Astronomical Objects: Bayesian Modeling, Computation, and Inference

Presented by David van Dyk, University of California, Irvine
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Santa Monica, CA

A Stimulus-Locked VAR Model for fMRI Event-Related Connectivity Analyses

Presented by Wesley Thompson, University of Pittsburgh
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Pittsburgh, PA

Robust Standard Errors and Experimental Design

Presented by Larry Hedges, Northwestern University
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Pittsburgh, PA

Simultaneous Inference: When Should Hypothesis Testing Problems Be Combined?

Presented by Bradley Efron, Stanford University
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Santa Monica, CA

Secure Logistic Regression with Distributed Databases

Presented by Aleksandra Slavkovic, Pennsylvania State University
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Pittsburgh, PA

Enabling Knowledge Networks in 21st Century Organizational Forms: From Disasters to WoW

Presented by Dr. Noshir Contractor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, July 26, 2007
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Improving Efficiency of Inferences in Randomized Clinical Trials Using Auxiliary Covariates

Presented by Dr. Marie Davidian, North Carolina State University
Thursday, May 17, 2007
RAND Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA

A Multivariate Nongaussian Bayesian Spatial Modeling Framework for Hurricane Surface Wind Fields

Presented by Montserrat Fuentes, North Carolina State University, Department of Statistics
Thursday, April 12, 2007
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

"Proof" in Medicine: The Role of Research Synthesis

Presented by Professor Joel B. Greenhouse, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Statistics
Thursday, March 15, 2007
RAND Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA

Visualization Databases for Loseless Analysis of Complex Data Sets

Presented by William Cleveland, Purdue
Thursday, February 15, 2007
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Clustering Functional Data: Methods and Applications

Presented by Catherine Sugar, USC
Thursday, December 14, 2006
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Treed Gaussian Processes and Limiting Linear Models, with applications to Computer Experiments

Presented by Herbie Lee, UCSC
Thursday, October 5, 2006
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Doing Thousands of Hypothesis Tests at the Same Time

Presented by Brad Efron, Stanford
Thursday, September 21, 2006
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Strategies for Model-Based Imputation in High-Dimensional Incomplete Data Sets

Presented by Thomas R. Belin, UCLA Dept. of Biostatistics
Thursday, May 11, 2006
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Statistical Analysis of Social Networks

Presented by Stanley Wasserman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, March 9, 2006
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Extensions of Respondent-Driven Sampling: Analyzing Continuous Variables and Multivariate Analysis Using Dual-Component Sampling Weights

Presented by Douglas Heckathorn, Dept. of Sociology, Cornell University
Thursday, December 8, 2005
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Uncertainty Quantification for Combining Experimental Data and Computer Simulations

Presented by Brian Williams, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Thursday, December 1, 2005
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA

Fifty Years of Empirical Bayes

Presented by Bradley Efron, Stanford University
Thursday, October 27, 2005
10:30 a.m.
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
Forum m-1226-1228

Topic TBA

Presented by David Hinkley, University of California Santa Barbara
September 8, 2005
10:30 a.m. - 12:00
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA
Forum m-1226-1228

Object Oriented Data Analysis

Presented by J.S. Marron
Department of Statistics and Operations Research
University of North Carolina
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Forum m-1226-1228, Santa Monica D.C.: Rm. 6201; Pittsburgh: Rm. 434

Mixed-Effects Cox Models

Presented by Terry Therneau, Mayo Clinic
Thursday, April 07, 2005, 10:30 a.m.
Forum m-1226-1228, Santa Monica

Identification of the Variance Components in the
General Two-Variance Linear Model

Presented by Jim Hodges, Division of Biostatistics and Director
Biostatistics Core
Minnesota Oral Health Clinical Research Center at the University of Minnesota
Friday, February 11, 2005, 10:30 a.m.
Forum m-1224, Santa Monica

Responsive Design for Household Surveys:
Tools for Actively Controlling Survey Nonresponse and Costs

Presented by Robert M. Groves, Director University of Michigan Survey Research Center
Institute for Social Research Joint Program in Survey Methodology
Friday, January 7, 2005, 10:30 a.m.
Forum m-1226, Santa Monica
Sponsored by the RAND Statistics Group and the RAND Survey Research Group

Modeling Massive Dynamic Graphs

Presented by Dr. Chris Volinsky, Director
Statistics Research Department
AT&T Research
Florham, Park, NJ
Thursday, January 27, 2005, 10:30 a.m.
Forum m-1226-28, Santa Monica

Reasoning with Cause and Effect

Presented by Judea Pearl
University of California, Los Angeles
December 9, 2004, 10:30 a.m.
Forum m-1226 - Santa Monica

Selection and Estimation for Large-Scale Simultaneous Inference

Presented by Brad Efron
Stanford University
October 28, 2004, 4:00 pm - reception at 3:30 p.m.
Santa Monica, CA

Improved Minimax Prediction Under Kullback-Leibler Loss

Presented by Edward George
The Wharton School Statistics Department
June 17, 2004, 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Blending Statistics and Graphics in Visual Data Mining

Presented by Antony Unwin
University of Augsburg, Germany
May 20, 2004, 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Effect of Length Biased Sampled Sojourn Times on the Survival Distribution from Screen-Detected Diseases

Presented by Karen Kafadar
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado, Denver
Thursday, April 15, 2004, 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Visual Exploration of Graph Data in GGobi

Presented by Debby Swayne
AT&T Labs-Research
Florham Park, NJ
Thursday, March 18, 2004, 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Causal Inference with General Treatment Regimes: Generalizing the Propensity Score

Presented by David van Dyk
Department of Statistics
University of California at Irvine
Monday, January 26, 2004 4:00 p.m.
Main Conference Room

Listening Post

Presented by Mark Hansen
University of California, Los Angeles
Thursday, November 20, 2003 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

The Trouble with Harry (Markowitz)

Presented by James Thompson
Rice University
Thursday, October 23, 2003 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Large-scale Simultaneous Hypothesis Testing

Presented by Brad Efron
Department of Statistics
Stanford University
Thursday, September 18, 2003 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Random Effects Models for Dyadic Network Data

Presented by Peter Hoff, Assistant Professor
Departments of Statistics and Biostatistics Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences
University of Washington
Thursday, May 15, 2003 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Survival Analysis using Flowgraph Models

Presented by Aparna Huzurbazar, Senior Advisor and Statistician
RAND Corporation, Santa Monica
Thursday, June 19, 2003 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Bayesian Modeling and Analysis of Treatment-Response Data

Presented by Siddhartha Chib, Harry C. Hartkopf Professor of Econometrics and Statistics
Department of Statistics
John M. Olin School of Business
Washington University, St. Louis
Thursday, April 17, 2003 4:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Probability Measures of Fuzzy Sets

Presented by Nozer D. Singpurwalla, Professor of Statistics
Department of Statistics
The George Washington University
Friday, March 28, 2003 2:00 pm
Main Conference Room

Egocentric Network Analysis

Presented by Christopher McCarty, Survey Director
Survey Research Center
University of Florida
Thursday, February 6, 2003 3:00 pm
Main Conference Room