Carolina Franco, Committee on International Relations in Statistics Chair, and Sloka Iyengar, Statistics Without Borders Director of Marketing and Communications

A new initiative by the ASA’s Committee on International Relations in Statistics and Statistics Without Borders has been uniting statisticians from around the world with a common interest in learning about popular and emerging statistics topics. The Committee on International Relations in Statistics/Statistics Without Borders webinar series is a bimonthly event during which experts introduce areas of statistics of wide interest.

The first webinar took place in May and covered the topic of small area estimation. It drew more than 150 participants. The second webinar was held in July and introduced Bayesian inference, drawing 160 participants. The third webinar, “An Introduction to Spatial Statistics with Applications to Disease Mapping,” occurred in September and drew a record audience of 170.

The latest webinar was held by Alex Schmidt from McGill University and focused on conditional auto-regressive spatial models with inference following the Bayesian paradigm. Apart from being the third speaker, Schmidt is a member of the Committee on International Relations in Statistics as an international representative to the ASA Board and has been instrumental in the creation of the webinar series, leading the program development. The webinar drew participants from countries including Brazil and Bangladesh. In a survey sent after the webinar, participants commented on the excellent presentation and clarity of the delivery by Schmidt.

Another webinar was presented by Shirin Golchi, also from McGill University. Like in the previous webinars, participants asked several questions relating to Bayesian statistics, including practical and philosophical questions about improper priors, the meaning of the “true value” of a parameter under the Bayesian paradigm, and Markov chain Monte Carlo convergence diagnostic tools. Besides introducing the main concepts in Bayesian inference, Golchi illustrated how to use the R package brms, which allows for easy application of the STAN software via R. She also provided information about additional resources. Participants praised Golchi for the clarity of her presentation, her in-depth knowledge of the subject, and her excellent examples.

The next webinar, “Deep Learning: Opening the Black Box,” will be taught by Jennifer Hoeting, professor emeritus at Colorado State University, on December 8 from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. EST. Though the webinars are free, registration is required.

Topic suggestions for future webinars can be emailed to Schmidt, Committee on International Relations in Statistics chair Carolina Franco, or Statistics Without Borders representative Sloka Iyengar.