IASC News February 2019
New IASC and Taylor & Francis Affiliate Program Means Discounts on Book Purchases
Summary: IASC and Taylor & Francis have agreed on a new affiliate program that gives IASC
members a 20% discount on book purchases.
IASC is pleased to announce its new affiliate agreement with Taylor & Francis. Taylor & Francis
(and their CRC Press and Chapman & Hall branches) are the publishers of numerous statistical
book series such as The R Series and Texts in Statistical Science and of numerous books in
the area of Computational Statistics.
Our agreement with Taylor & Francis offers current IASC members a 20% discount on book
purchases when initiated through the IASC web page. You have to start at https://iasc-isi.org/
and then click on the “IASC ISI Members Save 20% on CRC Press Books” link at the bottom
of this page. This redirects you to the IASC ISI web page maintained by Taylor & Francis /
CRC Press. Make your online order as usual. At the time of checkout, please enter IAS18 as
promo code (if necessary). Enjoy your discounted book purchases from Taylor & Francis.
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 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), 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 4th 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 2019 Paper Award”.
Abstracts for contributed talks and contributed posters can be submitted online until March
8, 2019.
2nd LARS-IASC School on Computational Statistics and Data Science
As a satellite event of the 4th LACSC, the 2nd LARS-IASC School on Computational
Statistics and Data Science, under the topic “Robust Statistics”, will be held in Guayaquil,
Ecuador, from May 26-27, 2019. More information can be found here.
LARS-IASC BoD Elections for 2019-2020
Between December 2018 and January 2019, the elections for the Board of Directors for the
period 2019-2020 of the Latin-American Regional Section of the International Association for
Statistical Computing were conducted. We would like to congratulate Verónica González
López (Brazil) and thank her for her availability to serve as Chairperson-Elect of LARS-IASC
between February 2019 and December 2020, and as President between January 2021 and
December 2022! We would also like to congratulate Javier Trejos Zelaya (Costa Rica),
Martha Patricia Bohórquez Castañeda (Colombia), Manuel Mendoza Ramírez (Mexico) and
Rodrigo Salas (Chile), that were elected to serve in the LARS-IASC Board of Directors (BoD)
between February 2019 and December 2022.
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 http://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 Härdle, 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: https://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 conference). 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.
Dwonload: 2019-02_IASC