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 here.

Fourth Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing (LACSC)

Call for Papers
The 4th Latin American Conference on Statistical Computing (LACSC 2018) 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), which is the most
important event 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 4rd LACSC can be found in our website.

The Scientific Program Committee of the 4th LACSC is now soliciting suggestions for Invited
Paper Sessions (IPS, 90 minutes with three speakers) to be considered as part of the
scientific program of the conference. Please submit formal proposals before March 8, 2019
to Paulo Canas Rodrigues (paulocanas@gmail.com), including title, brief description of the
topic, and a list of speakers and discussant who have agreed to be part of the session, and
their abstracts.

Young researchers (up to 5 years after their last academic degree) attending the 4th LACSC
will have the possibility to compete for the “Best LACSC 2018 Paper Award”.

Abstracts for contributed talks and contributed posters can be submitted online until March 8, 2017.

As a satellite event of the 4th LACSC, the 2nd LARS-IASC School on Computational
Statistics and Data Science, under the topic “Robust Statistics”, which will be held in
Guayaquil, Ecuador, from May 26-27, 2019. More information can be found here.

 

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 62 nd ISI World Statistics
Congress. The venue of DSSV 2019 is the Imadegawa Campus of Doshisha University. The details can be
found at the web-site https://iasc-isi.org/dssv2019/. 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, Kwan-Liu Ma, and Richard Samworth present keynote talks. Genevera Allen,
Yongdai Kim, Hidetoshi Shimodaira, and Carson Sievert 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 Statistics (ISBIS), the
Bernoulli Society, and others will contribute to an exciting program.

The venue, neighboring 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. Since 794 to 1868, the successive emperors lived in Kyoto, and 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 iasc-
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 see 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 (preprint) 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: 2019-01_IASC