IFDS Supporting Five Research Assistants in Spring 2020

Using funds from the National Science Foundation grant (under NSF’s TRIPODS and Convergence Programs), IFDS is funding five Research Assistants this semester to collaborate across departments on IFDS research. Each person is advised by one primary and one secondary adviser, all of them members of IFDS and all affiliated with …

Third Round of Cluster Hires Announced

The new cluster will expand on existing strengths of the university in this critical area, contribute to the growth of new programs and institutes on campus, and promote synergy between the contributing disciplines of statistics, mathematics and computer science.

IFDS Supporting Five Research Assistants in Spring 2019

Using funds from the National Science Foundation grant (under NSF’s TRIPODS and Convergence Programs), IFDS is funding five Research Assistants this semester to collaborate across departments on IFDS research. Each person is advised by one primary and one secondary adviser, all of them members of IFDS and all affiliated with …

Improved methods for studying hard-to-reach populations published in PNAS

Respondent-driven sampling is a popular network-based approach to
sample hard-to-reach populations, where participants refer contacts
into the sample through a coupon system. It has been particularly
useful in HIV research where individuals most at risk (e.g., people
who inject drugs) are unlikely to participate in conventional sampling
schemes. Many major health organizations, including the Centers for
Disease Control and the World Health Organization, employ this
approach to quantify the prevalence of HIV in these at-risk groups.
Unfortunately this type of network sampling suffers from a significant
drawback: because referred contacts often share similar
characteristics, samples are highly correlated which can lead to
exceedingly variable estimates.

In work that just appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, IFDS members Sebastien Roch and Karl Rohe introduced a
new estimation technique for respondent-driven sampling with a
substantially reduced variability…

Roch wins Best Paper Award at RECOMB

IFDS member Sebastien Roch and former mathematics Ph.D. student Kun-Chieh (Jason) Wang won Best Paper Award at the prestigious 22nd Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) 2018.