The IASC-ARS 25th Anniversary Conference & CASC 2nd Annual Conference

The IASC-ARS 25th Anniversary Conference was successfully held at the Beijing Conference
Center, China, on 9-11 November 2018. The conference is a joint meeting of the 25th
Anniversary Conference of the Asian Regional Section of the International Association for
Statistical Computing & the 2nd Annual Conference of the Chinese Association for Statistical
Computing (CASC). There were four keynote speakers: Donald B. Rubin, Jun Liu, Wing Kam
Fung and Fang Yao. The conference was well attended by about 150 participants from many
countries and regions with many parallel sessions and poster presentations.

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of IASC-ARS, we have established the Distinguished
Service Award in recognition and with sincere appreciation for the dedicated effort and
outstanding service to the IASC-ARS. It was announced in the opening ceremony of the
conference that the recipients of the first Distinguished Service Award are Professor Jae
Chang Lee and Professor Yutaka Tanaka. The Distinguished Service Award Presentation
Ceremony took place during the conference dinner.

A big thank you to all who participated in making the conference a great success. Special
thanks to the Center for Statistical Science, Tsinghua University for their tremendous support
they have provided as host and to the Conference Organizing Committee, particularly Ke
Deng, Lin Hou, Hanzhong Liu and Yuan Tian in scheduling the talks and arranging all the
logistics for the conference. Without their efforts and time, it would be impossible for us to have
such a successful conference.

 

LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and Data Science
Statistics of extremes: Modeling, inferences, and applications

The Latin American Regional Section (LARS) of the International Association for Statistical
Computing (IASC) will organize its first “LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and
Data Science” in Salvador, Brazil, from November 15-17, 2018, under the topic “Statistics of
extremes: Modeling, inferences, and applications”. The main purpose of the LARS-IASC
School is to spread the knowledge base and advances in Statistical Computing in Latin
American countries and to increase the quality and quantity of researchers in the field. The
“LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and Data Science” will be a satellite event of
the 1st Conference on Statistics and Data Science, that will also be held in Salvador, Brazil,
from November 12-14, 2018.
The LARS-IASC School on Extreme Value Theory will feature the lecturers Miguel de Carvalho
(University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK), Manuele Leonelli (University of Glasgow, Scotland,
UK) and Dani Gamerman (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
More information about the program and registration for the LARS-IASC School on
Computational Statistics and Data Science can be found here.

 

Final CRoNoS Spring Course

The final CRoNoS Spring Course will take place at the Poseidonia Beach Hotel, Limassol,
Cyprus, 14-16 April 2019. The aim of this training course is to put together several tutorials on
topics related to robust statistics, computational statistics and the treatment of non-standard
data. The course is sponsored by COST and IASC-ERS.
Eligible PhD students and Early Career Investigators can apply for grants. More details can be
found at cmstatistics.org/CRONOSMDA2019.

Forth Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing
Guayaquil, Ecuador, May 28-31, 2019

The Forth Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing (LACSC 2019) will be held in
Guayaquil, Ecuador, from May 28-31, 2019. This international conference, will be held together
with the International Conference on Robust Statistics (ICORS 2019), which is the most
important event in Robust Statistics. Its aim is to gather researchers interested in statistical
computing in Latin America and from other parts of the world, and is the official
conference of the Latin American Regional Section of the International Association for Statistical Computing (LARS-IASC). More details about the LACSC 2019 will be available soon.

The Conference of Data Science, Statistics & Visualisation (DSSV 2019)

The conference of Data Science, Statistics & Visualisation (DSSV 2019) will take place on August
13-15, 2019 in Kyoto, Japan. This conference is a satellite meeting of the 62nd ISI World Statistics
Congress. The venue of DSSV 2019 is the Imadegawa Campus of Doshisha University. The
details can be found at the website. At this site, registration and abstract submission will be
received since Feb. 5, 2019, with the deadline of abstract submission May 7, 2019. Further, at
the site, rooms in the hotels convenient for the venue can be reserved, soon later.
This meeting shall create a forum to discuss recent progress
and emerging ideas in these different disciplines. The conference welcomes contributions to practical aspects of
data science, statistics and visualisation, and presentations can cover topics such as machine learning, verbalization of
data, big data infrastructures and analytics, advanced
computing, and other important themes.

Di Cook and Kwan-Liu
Ma present keynote talks. Genevera Allen, Carson Sievert, Yongdai Kim, and Hidetoshi Shimodaira give
invited talks. Those talks ensure a high-quality scientific program. The committee also is considering invitation of other speakers. In
addition, the invited sessions from the International Society for Business and
Industrial Statisticsi (ISBIS), the Bernoulli Society, and others will contribute to an exciting program.

The venue, neighboring the Kyoto Imperial Palace, can be reached within 10 minutes via a subway from the Kyoto central station. The welcome reception and conference dinner with traditional Japanese style will be thrown at the areas close to the downtown, which can be reached easily from the venue
within about twenty minutes via some transports. As Kyoto had been the Japanese capital for a long period (794-1868), there
are 17 world heritages (including Kinkakuji temple presented left), each of which can be reached by a half-day travel at most from the venue.

 

The IASC-ARS 2019 Conference

Call for Invited Session Proposals for the 2019 IASC-ARS Conference – 2-5 December
2019, Hong Kong
The 11th IASC-ARS Conference will be held at the University of Hong Kong, China, on 2-5
December 2019. The theme of the conference is “Statistical Computing for AI and Big Data”.
The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for the discussion and exchange of ideas, new
concepts and recent methods in statistics. Philip Leung-ho Yu from the Department of Statistics
and Actuarial Science of the University of Hong Kong will be the General Chair of the
conference.
The Local Organizing Committee of the IASC-ARS 2019 invites submissions of Invited Session
Proposals. An invited session proposal includes a session title, general description of the
session, list of speakers, and tentative talk titles.
Submissions may be made by email to miasc-ars2019@hku.hk. The submission deadline is
28 February 2019. The organizers will be notified of the review committee’s decision by 31
March 2019. Click here for the poster of Call for Invited Session Proposals for the details.
Keynote Speakers: Wolfgang Karl Hӓrdle, Jun Liu, and Qiwei Yao
Local organizer: Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, The University of Hong Kong
We look forward to seeing you in Hong Kong!

 

Cluster Benchmarking Challenge Call

Neutral Benchmarking Studies of Clustering

The Cluster Benchmarking Task Force of the International
Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS) is calling for neutral
benchmarking studies in cluster analysis. This call is part of a
challenge connected with the 2019 IFCS conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, August 26-29.
To achieve a cumulative building of knowledge on clustering and classification, careful
attention to benchmarking (performance comparison of methods) is very important. New
methods of data pre-processing, new data-analytic techniques, and new methods of output
post-processing, should be extensively and carefully compared with existing alternatives, and
existing methods should be part of neutral comparison studies. Benchmarking studies can
frequently been found in supervised learning, but are less common in unsupervised learning.

The Task Force has written a white paper (for a preprint, see: arxiv.org/abs/1809.10496) that
addresses the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of benchmarking in cluster analysis,
and some practicalities for performing sound benchmarking studies. The Task Force is now
calling for individuals to contribute neutral benchmarking studies on cluster analysis as part
of a challenge.

Rules for submission:

• Contributions for the challenge must be e-mailed to Iven.VanMechelen@kuleuven.be.
• A contribution should comprise a report on a benchmarking study in the context of
cluster analysis. This report should have a length of between 5 and 15 pages, including
text, tables, figures and references; other materials can be submitted as separate files.
• The benchmarking study may compare methods of data pre-processing, clustering
(potentially but not necessarily including the estimation of cluster parameters such as
the number of clusters), and/or output post-processing, and may use empirical or
simulated data.
• Contributors should have a neutral point of view with respect to the methods studied in
the contribution. This means that they should not be an author or co-author of one or
more of the studied method(s). It is also expected that the contributors do not have a
personal interest to promote any of the involved methods in particular.
• The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2019, 12:00 pm CET.

Competition guidelines:

• Contributions to the challenge will be evaluated by the IFCS Task Force on
Benchmarking.
• Major evaluation criteria will be:
• the technical correctness and clarity of the report,
• that the study shows a critical reflection on principles on which a sound
benchmarking study should be based (which may be either in line or at odds
with the principles outlined in the white paper contributed by the Task Force),
• a detailed specification of the choices made in the benchmarking study at
issue along with a justification of these based on the principles referred to
above.
• Up to 8 contributions will be selected for a short presentation during one or two
invited sessions at the 2019 IFCS conference in Thessaloniki, Greece (such a
presentation will not conflict with giving another presentation at that con¬ference).
The authors of the selected contributions will be notified no later than April 25, 2019.
Authors of selected contributions who cannot attend the conference will be invited to
prepare a few slides on their contribution.
• During the closing session of the IFCS conference one or two of the selected
contributions will be proclaimed winners of the challenge. The winners will receive a
CRC/Chapman and Hall book voucher.
• Contact for questions: Iven.VanMechelen@kuleuven.be.

All researchers interested in clustering and classification are most welcome to
participate in this challenge!
Task force members: Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Rainer Dangl, Nema Dean, Isabelle Guyon,
Christian Hennig, Friedrich Leisch, Douglas Steinley, Iven Van Mechelen, and Matthijs
Warrens.

 

Download: 2018-12_IASC