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New Zealand Statistical Association Newsletter 65

March 2007

Local News

AgResearch
Our deepest sympathy goes to David Baird and his three girls who lost a much loved wife and mother, Karen, in November, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour early in the year. David worked only part time from home last year while he nursed Karen. Karen did some part-time work with our group at Lincoln many years back, in the pre-AgResearch, MAF days. Her friendly, cheerful nature will be missed by her many friends.

On the conference scene, five of us from our group attended the Australasian GenStat/StatGen Conference at Victor Harbor, near Adelaide, in December. Peter Johnstone and Dave Saville occupied 67% of the second session, giving talks entitled respectively “Statistics, the Law and the Thieving Fishers” (a brilliant topic for a sweltering Aussie afternoon) and “Regression errors in ‘x’ case study” (not heavy duty, but less mirth-generating...). Next morning, David Baird talked on (GenStat) “Workbooks and other spreadsheet enhancements” and Roger Littlejohn talked on “Hidden Markov models” (in case you can count, the fifth attendee was John Koolaard). That night, many of us went blue penguin spotting, and the following night we visited a winery for the conference dinner. All in all, it was a good, well-organised conference at a good venue.

Dave Saville

Lincoln University
Panic and horror strikes at the heart of statistical advisees as Alison Lister hands in her resignation to follow husband Peter to Melbourne. Alison has been a statistical consultant in the Bio-Protection and Ecology Division at Lincoln University since being drawn from computing to return to statistics two years ago. She (a) will be very much missed and (b), as fellow lunch-time joggers will testify, won’t be easy to replace.

Richard Sedcole

University of Otago
The department welcomed Peter Dillingham as a new lecturer in statistics in February 2007. Peter has degrees in mathematics and statistics from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Moving south, he worked in biostatistics and ecological statistics at the University of Washington, affiliated with the Schools of Medicine and Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences. He arrived in New Zealand after travelling halfway around the world from Dublin, happy to find the same weather.

David Fletcher is settling back in to teaching again after his sabbatical in 2006, and can still feel the benefits of having done only research in the last year. He presented a poster at the EURING mark-recapture conference, based on joint research with local ecologist Murray Efford, entitled “The effect of senescence on estimation of adult survival rate when age is unknown”. He also organised an evening trip for EURING delegates to the titi (sooty shearwater or muttonbird) colony at Taiaroa Head, one of the study sites for the project on sustainable harvesting of titi chicks that David is working on with colleagues from the Zoology department at Otago. As well as getting a good look at the birds coming back to their burrows, McNaught’s comet came into view as everyone headed back to the bus to return to town - a spectacular end to a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Irene Goodwin

Crop & Food
At the start of December, Andrew McLachlan, Andrew Wallace, Duncan Hedderley and Ruth Butler went to South Australia for the GenStat/StatGen conference. Highlights included some genuinely summery weather; John Nelder explaining Hierarchical Generalised Linear Models; and Ruth talking about field trials on scent lures for insect pests (Well, that’s what she said they were - the aerial photograph looked suspiciously like runway markings for UFOs.)

Meanwhile, Esther Meenken got to the UK without incident, and is doing well on the MSc Biometry course at Reading University. Ruth Butler will be heading Reading-wards in March, for the next contact period on her DStat (professional doctorate in statistics), catching up with her supervisor, and studying Survival Analysis. Andrew McLachlan’s travel plans are both more and less ambitious; he is part of the Crop & Food Relay For Life team, which is aiming to walk the distance between Palmerston North and Christchurch.

Duncan Hedderley

Forest Research
NZ Forest Research Institute (Ensis and Scion): Forest Research (formerly known as FRI or NZFRI) has formed a joint venture (Ensis) with our CSIRO counterparts. As a result of this and the diversifying of research interests into the field of ‘biomaterials’, staff now work under one of two brands: Ensis, the forestry joint venture, and Scion, the rest.

We have 3 statisticians, Mark Kimberley, Mina van der Colff and Rod Ball, this side of the Tasman.

Association mapping in plants: The book, “Association mapping in plants”, N.C. Raguzie et al. editors, with chapters by Ensis/Scion staff has been published by Springer. The book is a joint venture between Australian and New Zealand plant science researchers - the editors and authors are current or former staff from HortResearch, Ensis/Scion, and Agriculture Victoria. The ‘down under’ connection is completed with a preface by Bruce Weir (Univ. of Washington).

The book, which covers experimental and statistical techniques for association mapping (finding population level associations between genetic markers and traits), was the best selling title at the Springer stand at the recent Plant and Animal Genome conference in San Diego in January. See http://www.springer.com/west/home/life+sci/life+sci+bestsellers?SGWID=4-40341-22-173665631-0.

Statistical methods, including Bayesian methods for experimental design and analysis, are covered in Chapters 7 (H. N. De Silva and R. D. Ball) and chapter 8 (R. D. Ball). The statistical methods are not limited to plants, and include re-analyses of published data sets from human genetics (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease), Bayes factor calculations for common tests (e.g. TDT test and variants), and an MCMC application.

Association mapping in Finland: Rod Ball was an invited lecturer in a doctoral course on association mapping in Oulu, Finland (150km from the arctic circle), organised by the Finnish national graduate school for Population Genetics in December. The course included `students’ from the university and research institutes in the area, as well as Sweden (1), and Italy (3).

The following week he visited Mikko Sillanpää (also a lecturer in the course) at University of Helsinki to work on Bayesian methods for statistical genetics, and on the way back visited Edgar Kublin and Matthias Schmidt in Freiburg, Germany to work on spline models in forestry, and sampled skiing in Austria (Stubai Glacier) and Switzerland (Grindelwald, Zermatt). Global warming was a frequent topic - there was no snow in Oulu in December and little in the rest of Europe. Ski events, trips on ice breakers, and visits to Santa's reindeer were all hit hard.

Rod Ball

University Of Auckland
The department has celebrated a number of notable successes recently. Alastair Scott, Alan Lee, and Chris Wild won a $600,000 Marsden grant on the topic “Model fitting with complex sampling structures”. Alastair Scott won the 2006 Waksberg Award from the American Statistical Association and the Statistical Society of Canada for his work on survey sampling, and gave invited addresses at five international conferences in 2006. James Curran and Chris Triggs were co-authors of the paper that won the 2006 PW Allen award of the Forensic Science Society, for the best paper published in Science and Justice in 2005. Their work reported on the distribution of glass fragments following experiments with firearms and hammer, and we can only imagine what might have happened to the judges’ windows had they not won the prize.

Continuing a departmental teaching tradition, Matt Regan won a Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and Rachel Fewster won a university Early Career Teaching Excellence Award. These awards are the latest in a series of seven teaching awards for the department at national, university, and faculty level since 2002 - a legacy of head of department Chris Wild, who has been behind each of them, sometimes even preparing the application without the applicant’s knowledge! Chris’s term as HoD has just come to an end after four years of exemplary leadership. Welcome back to the job for incoming HoD Alan Lee!

Recent contract successes include $500,000 for Marti Anderson for ecosystems research contracts, primarily from the Auckland Regional Council, and $115,000 for Alan Lee from Statistics New Zealand. Russell Millar won funding from the University Research Fellowships Fund, in a very competitive process, to complete his book `Applied Likelihood Methods: with examples in R and SAS’. Ilze Ziedins won the university’s first Solander Fellowship to spend a month at Lund in Sweden.

The department’s PhD students have celebrated several successes recently. Richard Umstaetter and Wayne Stewart have successfully defended their theses. Richard has taken up a postdoc at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Caltech, and Wayne is now a full time senior tutor in our department. Rat researchers Steven Miller and James Russell have added several new successes to their names. Steven won a top prize in the Faculty poster competition, and his research was featured in a full-page article in the New Zealand Education Review in September, entitled “Tu rattus turpis” (You dirty rat). James won first prize for a student presentation at the Australasian Wildlife Management Society Conference, and the prize for best publication by a new researcher at the New Zealand Ecological Society Conference, in addition to a Solander Travel Grant to visit Sweden later this year. The rat work of the Rodent Invasion group involving James Russell, Steven Miller, and Rachel Fewster gained headline status in the January issue of Marsden Update, and even made it to the inner pages of the Dominion Post in February. This exposure is most likely due to the group’s flagship emblem: a postcard of a Norway rat in the Bay of Islands, created by Stephen Cope, in which Northland tourism concerns have consistently failed to take an interest.

Russell Millar continued his high-profile media quest to explain probability to the masses, giving an excellent interview to Eva Radich on National Radio in November. Among other nuggets of wisdom, Russell explained that the diminishing profits reported by Sky City Casino could have been due to its hosting of the ASC/NZSA conference last year. The casino’s profit margins will have overlooked the crisis of a week’s occupation by statisticians, none of whom visited the gaming tables once!

Ross Parsonage organised the department’s Annual Teachers’ Workshop Day for secondary school teachers, with nearly 200 participants from as far afield as the Bay of Plenty and Hawkes Bay. Maxine Pfannkuch’s work in designing the new school curriculum for statistics was a major driver for the success of the day and the exceptionally large attendance.

In other activities, the department’s position as the Home of R has been reinforced by Ross Ihaka’s R Programming Workshop in November, and the Directions in Statistical Computing workshop in February with over 60 international participants. Marti Anderson and Sharon Browning have both been jet-setting around the US and Europe, giving and attending workshops. George Seber was the guest of honour at the international EURING conference in Dunedin. Patricia Metcalf co-authored no fewer than 60% of the articles in a November issue of the Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association!

And finally, an unexpected collaboration with the English department hit the headlines in November, when for the first time Statistics department research became the topic of a children’s book and play! “The Amazing Adventures of Razza the Rat”, by Witi Ihimaera, was inspired by James Russell’s adventures with “lost, stolen or strayed “ radio-tagged Norway rat Razza. The story was performed by the children of Sunnynook Primary School in December. Reeling from the shock of being portrayed in the book as an elderly balding scientist, and on stage as a 9-year-old girl, James submitted his PhD and fled to the South Island, where he hasn’t been heard of since...

Rachel Fewster

Sunnybrooke performance, with James Russel at back and Witi Ihimaera at front

Wellington Statistics Group
The Wellington Statistics Group (WSG), a local group of the NZSA, continues to meet regularly. The Group receives regular sponsorship from the Ministry of Social Development, Statistics New Zealand, Statistics Research Associates Ltd, and Victoria University of Wellington. Since the last NZSA Newsletter, and before the now-traditional ‘summer break’, there were WSG talks given by:

12 October: Dimitar Christozov (American University in Bulgaria) and Stefanka Chukova (Victoria University of Wellington), “Estimation of the mean cumulative function from automotive warranty data: a stratification approach “

1 November: Len Cook, Former NZ Government Statistician (1992-2000) and
Head of the UK Office for National Statistics, the Registrar General of England and Wales, and the first UK National Statistician (2000-2005), “What might official statistics in the Antipodes learn from the British statistical system, and vice versa?”

22 November: Estate Khmaladze, Victoria University of Wellington, “On distributions that do not follow asymptotic theory and other anomalies”.

28 November: Nanny Wermuth, Chalmers/Gothenburg University, Sweden, “Distortions of effects”.

David Harte took over as Convenor of WSG from John Haywood at the start of December 2006, when John started a 12 month sabbatical as a Visiting Scholar at the UCLA Department of Statistics. John had been WSG Convenor since August 2001, when the group first met and when John agreed to convene an interim ‘steering committee’.

Anyone who does not presently receive WSG announcements and who wishes to be put on the WSG mailing list can subscribe at the WSG general information web page, hosted by the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at VUW: http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo.cgi/wsg

John Haywood

Victoria University
This news entry from VUW is a little lighter than usual, since John Haywood has been living in Santa Monica, CA since December 2006, so he’s found it harder than usual to ‘encourage’ people to give him their news. However, John is enjoying his sabbatical time as a Visiting Scholar at the UCLA Department of Statistics, and also enjoying the winter weather in Santa Monica. One day recently, it rained; this prompted Helen (now aged 4) to say, “But it never rains here!” on the way to preschool. She was correct that this winter has been quite a lot drier than normal: only 0.85 inches of rain at LAX so far this year (to Feb 22), compared to the average 5.33 inches. (The web is a wonderful source of data!)

Dong Wang is also on sabbatical and has been travelling widely since July 2006, including occasional returns to Wellington for brief periods. Dong returns from leave at the end of April 2007. Ivy Liu will be hosting Bhramar Mukherjee (Department of Biostatistics, University of Michigan) again in 2007 (probably around May-June), as she did in 2006. While in Wellington, Bhramar will give a short course about applying Bayesian procedures to solve problems in Genetic Epidemiology, which she delivered at the JSM in 2006.

Shirley Pledger attended the EURING 2007 conference at Otago University in mid-January and seems to have had a great time. To quote Shirley: “The conference was a delight - thank you to the Otago organisers. You may wonder why a statistician attends a European Union for Ring Banding Conference, and why the conference is in New Zealand. It has lots of capture-recapture modelling, and the biologists and statisticians have copied the birds in not recognising European borders.” Shirley’s international leadership in capture-recapture methods has also been further recognised by an invitation to present at the Recent Developments in Capture-Recapture Methods and their Applications Conference in Reading UK in July. On the same trip she has also been invited to spend a week at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

Estate Khmaladze has a new PhD student, Haizhen Wu, starting his research currently. Haizhen won a targeted PhD scholarship and joins Giorgi Kvizhinadze in Estate’s group of PhDs; Giorgi commenced his research in August 2006. Estate was an invited speaker in early January at the International Indian Statistical Association 2007 Conference in Cochin, India. Estate has also been invited as a key note speaker to one of the programs being held later in 2007 to mark the Platinum Jubilee celebration (75 years) of the Indian Statistical Institute.

The Operations Research team were well represented at the ORSNZ 2006 Conference held at University of Canterbury (30 Nov-1 Dec). Stefanka Chukova and Mark Johnston, plus Honours students Sarah Marshall and Bronwyn Erasmuson all gave talks. Stefanka presented work done jointly with two current research students, Dinu Corbu and Jason O’Sullivan. We all enjoyed the three months that Stefanka’s visitor, Dimitar Christozov (American University in Bulgaria), spent with us from August to October 2006. Stefanka and Dimitar gave a joint talk to the Wellington Statistics Group on 12 October, “Estimation of the mean cumulative function from automotive warranty data: a stratification approach”.

Some very happy news to finish with is that Mark Johnston went overseas shortly after the ORSNZ conference and got married to Emily Densham on 13th Jan 2007 at Yatton village church (near Bristol, UK). Congratulations to Mark and Emily from all of us. While in the UK, Mark also visited research collaborators at the University of Essex (Colchester) and the University of the West of England (Bristol). Mark assures us, however, that he wasn’t doing collaborative OR research while on his honeymoon, but he did try out scuba diving, and they enjoyed perfect weather.

John Haywood

University of Canterbury
Carl and the organizing committee are busy putting together the final details of the NZSA2007 conference; see the main entry for more details.

Jennifer Brown attended a course on Correspondence Analysis in Sydney in December 2006 and is now very enthusiastic about the method. She has a student, Lisa Henley, now using the technique for analysis of child-development.

The department supported a number of summer scholarship students in statistics, who worked on a range of projects:
- Application of bayesian networks to modelling movement of children among IQ groups with age (Lisa Henley)
- Modelling track-user behaviour and satisfaction of a popular NZ walking track (Kathryn Baldwin).
- Application of support vector machines for classification (Olivia Son)
- The distributions of change points in long memory processes (GuanYu Zheng)

Congratulations to our graduates who were employed with Statistics NZ this year.

In November, postgraduate students and staff from the UoC and Otago descended on Queenstown for the inaugural South Island Mathematics & Statistics Postgraduate (SIMASP) Conference. This successful conference allowed participants to present their work in a friendly environment and to build networks with students from other departments.

The NZIMA programme on Modelling Invasive Species and Weed Impact is organising a 5 day workshop in Hanmer in April 2007. Up to 6 international mathematicians and statisticians, along with about 35 New Zealanders, will be invited. The workshop's format will be introductory sessions by New Zealand weed managers outlining the current issues and problems in weed management in NZ, followed by sessions from the international invitees on the latest developments in relevant mathematical and statistical tools. Each day, in the follow-up sessions, the workshop attendees will identify the gap between the knowledge that can be gained from the the current mathematical models and what is needed by NZ weed managers. The NZIMA programme goal is to bridge that gap by stimulating relevant research amongst NZ mathematicians and statisticians. More information is at http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/bio/NZIMA/.

Dr John Newell from the National University of Ireland, Galway has officially become an Adjunct Senior Fellow, as part of ongoing plans to foster greater links and cooperation between our respective departments. Congratulations John and glad to have you on board.

Carl, Dominic and Marco are commencing a research program with their PhD students, Xin Zhao and Marina Zahari, looking at using high resolution physiological measurements to understand longer term health outcomes for preterm babies. For which they are also busy roping in willing honours students!

Carl Scarrott

Massey University, Albany
Jeff Hunter received the Campbell Award for his contributions to statistical research, education and services to the profession (see also awards section). Well done Jeff! Although Jeff’s retirement is imminent, he is keeping very busy, publishing work and presenting papers, recently at the New Zealand Maths Colloquium in Hamilton.

The University advertised last year for a new Chair in Statistics to replace Jeff’s position. Despite all expectations the university has been unsuccessful in making an appointment. We wait to see what transpires!

Our senior tutor Marie Fitch has been kept rather busy over the summer; according to Marie the numbers in our summer school program for Business Statistics reached a record number, up by around 25% from the previous year.

Our congratulations go to Beatrix Jones and Danny Walsh on the birth of their first child Albert.

Paul Cowpertwait

Massey University, Turitea
Our graduate student room has become rather crowded of late, following the arrival of Ting Wang (China), Marisa Isidro (Philippines), Tilman Davies (Australia), and Joyce Leung and Brigid Betz-Stablein (Palmerston North). Another arrival from across the Tasman is Jonathan Marshall, who is here on a Massey University postdoctoral scholarship to work with Professors Martin Hazelton and Nigel French on smoothing relative risk surfaces in epidemiology. A much loved staff member has finally retired after 7 years of invaluable service – Louie, Jonathan Godfrey’s guide dog.

Ricardas Zitikis visited again in October to work with Chin Diew Lai and Mark Bebbington. Ricardis contributed an amusing and thought-provoking seminar to the Palmy Statisticians Day which, along with David Baird’s keynote address helped to make it another enjoyable and successful meeting. We currently have a sabbatical visitor from Korea,, who will work with Ganesalingam.

Doug Stirling spent some time at Nestlé in Lausanne, Switzerland in late September, working on the new chocolate version of CAST. At the same time Steve Haslett was in Nepal giving the final presentation of the poverty mapping project with the World Food Programme and World Bank.

Geoff Jones had an unexpectedly easy time this summer, when extramural enrolments in Business Statistics inexplicably dropped by 25%.

Two staff members are currently on sabbatical: Mark Bebbington in Palmerston North, and Alasdair Noble in Southampton. Alasdair is pictured here doing some serious research.

Geoff Jones

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