On the Horizon: Conference on Lifetime Data Science: Foundations and Frontiers

The ASA Section on Lifetime Data Science (LiDS) is the latest to be voted in by the Council of Sections. The objective of the section is to promote and support the development, application, and appropriate use of statistical methods for the design and analysis of studies of life history processes. This includes supporting the development of new methods, identifying new areas of application, and fostering interdisciplinary research in areas such as biomedicine, finance, economics, imaging, engineering, genomics, and genetics. In pursuing these objectives, the LiDS executive committee and membership will work closely with other ASA sections.

The inaugural chair of the Lifetime Data Analysis Interest Group (LiDA-IG)—the name of the group prior to becoming a section—was Ross Prentice (2014). He was succeeded by Mei-Ling Ting Lee (2015), Jack Kalbfleisch (2016), and Mei-Cheng Wang (2017). Through their leadership, the interest group quickly became active in sponsoring events such as the 2017 ICSA China Conference in Jilin City, China; the 2018 Workshop in Biostatistics and Bioinformatics in Atlanta, Georgia; the 2018 ICSA China Conference in Qingdao, China; and the 2018 International Workshop on the Statistical Analysis of Multi-Outcome Data in St. Louis, Missouri. The scientific committee of the inaugural conference of the LiDA-IG, “Lifetime Data Science: Data Science, Precision Medicine, and Risk Analysis with Lifetime Data,” was chaired by Mei-Cheng Wang and Jack Kalbfleisch and hosted by the University of Connecticut.

Lifetime Data Science Conference

The enthusiasm for LiDA-IG soon led to a membership of more than 230 individuals, which was instrumental in receiving section approval. To celebrate this achievement, LiDS is organizing a conference, “Lifetime Data Science: Foundations and Frontiers,” to be held at the University of Pittsburgh from May 29–31, 2019. The conference will begin with short courses taught by leading experts on May 29, including the following:

• Two Phase Studies for Lifetime Data, by Ornulf Borgan and Sven Ove Samuelsen (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Dynamic Prediction in Survival Analysis, by Hein Putter (Leiden University Medical Centre, The Netherlands)
• Biased Sampling, Left Truncation, and Survival Analysis, by Jing Qin (NIH/NIAID)

May 30–31 will feature invited speaker sessions on topics including survival analysis, joint modeling, competing risks and multistate models, recurrent event analysis, prediction, causal inference in life history analyses, measurement error, and missing data. There will also be three keynote addresses given by internationally renowned statisticians Odd Aalen of the University of Oslo, Danyu Lin of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Ross Prentice of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. A conference banquet will be held May 30.

Additionally, a poster competition and student paper competition will take place. Guoqing Diao of George Mason University is chair of the student paper competition committee. Information about how to apply is available at the Lifetime Data Science Conference website.

For more information about LiDS, visit their website.