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The Department of Statistics
Alumni Newsletter - January 2019
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|  | Winter view from the office in the Department of Statistics in Upham Hall | |
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| - provide the latest software tools and the servers to host them, including the server-based desktop used in our new hybrid classroom,
- underwrite the activities of student organizations such as the Miami StatHawks and Actuarial Science Club, and
- support the participation of our students at professional conferences.
Your gifts of time help our students see how their careers might evolve after completing their studies at Miami.
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| Greetings from the south side of Upham Hall. Happy New Year! The fall semester was a busy time with many exciting changes. In terms of new faculty, we had Xin Wang (Iowa State PhD) and Michael O’Connell (Minnesota PhD and Miami U BS) join the department as new tenure-track assistant professors, Lisa Werwinski (Miami MS) join us as a new assistant lecturer and David Swart (Miami MS, EKU MS) as a new instructor. We also successfully completed the search for a new tenure-track faculty member this fall. It is exciting to have new colleagues join us; however, I’m not sure how I moved so quickly from being one of the new faculty to the most senior person in STA. Construction on our new scale up classroom was completed last summer. This space is used to teach one large class of size 114 or two smaller classes of 54 and 60 or four smaller classes of 24, 30, 30 and 30. Our student workers are often running between classes to reconfigure this space! We started our Statistics Alumni Advisory Mentoring Panel (STA-AAMP) this fall, and we had 7 alumni and department friends return to campus. A big thanks and shout out to Mike Anderson, Mitch Beebe, Justin Hillier, George Jerdack, Sandy Steiger, AJ Tatro and Matt Wheeler. They treated groups of 4-5 students to lunch or dinner, and chatted with the chair and faculty about their perspectives regarding what Miami can do to better help prepare students to enter the workforce. We are excited that more alumni are already scheduled to visit this spring. If you are interested in giving back to our students through participating in this program, please email Lisa Werwinski, visit coordinator, and the department entity account.
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Finally, our planning for the 10th anniversary conference - November 7-9, 2019 - continues as you may have seen from our Save-the-Data (Date) email last fall. In addition, our conference website is now active. As always, thank you for your support!
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Stories & Topics in This Newsletter - Chair Reflections
- Women in Statistics and Data Science (WSDS)
- JSM 2018 Luncheon and Student Presentation Success
- Student R Package - ggvoronoi
- 660 Projects and External Clients
- A Chance to Meet One of Our Students - Bri Clements
- Q&A with New Faculty in Statistics - Qingcong Yuan and Lisa Werwinski
- 2018 Student Scholarship in Statistics
- Stats+Stories - Year in Review
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|  | Mazie Krehbiel, Mary Yu, Samantha Thompson and Dr. Tatjana Miljkovic | |
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Women in Statistics and Data Science (WSDS) We had a strong presence at the WSDS Conference this year. Mengyu Yu, Samantha Thomson, and Mazie Krehbiel presented the project “Exploration of the female actuarial research community." Lillian Li presented the project “Estimating a tail of extreme losses using an Inverse Burr Mixture Distribution.” Both of these projects were supervised by Dr. Tatjana Miljkovic. Nichole Rook also presented work that she produced under the mentorship of Dr. Tom Fisher exploring the accuracy of weather forecast, a project she completed with Robert Garrett and Ben Schweitzer.
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 | Ben Schweitzer and John Bailer participating in the Google-hosted cruise |
| JSM 2018 Luncheon and Student Presentation Success We had two undergraduate majors, Robert Garrett and Ben Schweitzer, present at JSM last summer in Vancouver. These students, along with Nichole Rook, worked on two different project as part of the DataExpo competition looking at the accuracy of weather forecast. They did outstanding work, and the project presented by Ben Schweitzer was awarded second place in the competition!
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Student R Package - ggvoronoi DataFest 2018 inspired something new this year - an R package! ggvoronoi was created by students Robert Garrett and Austin Nar in collaboration with faculty Tom Fisher and Karsten Maurer. This package adds a layer to an existing ggplot2 object to group observations into Voronni tesselations. An article describing the package and an application of the package have been published.
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660 Projects and External Clients We continue to work with external clients in our data practicum classes. In STA 660 last fall, we had Miami faculty clients from gerontology, kinesiology and health, and speech pathology and audiology. We also worked with scientists from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Five NIOSH staffers, including Miami STA alum Steve Gilbert, joined us during finals week to hear about the analyses associated with lead exposures and the bases of Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health (IDLH) limits.
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A Chance to Meet One of Our Students
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Bri Clements is a senior at Miami who is majoring in statistics, co-majoring in analytics and minoring in Chinese. Last summer, she worked at the Cleveland Clinic, and she recently accepted an offer to work at the Columbus Collaboratory. 1. What attracted you to come to Miami and study statistics? The first time I came to Miami, I instantly knew it was a place that I wanted to make my home for the next four years. It is difficult to describe the feeling, but I left my first tour knowing that I would be back soon to stay. I was drawn to major in statistics because I have always enjoyed uncovering patterns. Statistics allowed me to combine this with my love of people through client projects. I enjoy the challenge of statistics and knowing that every problem has multiple unique solutions to it. 2. How do you describe what you do to people who don't know anything about statistics? I consider there to be two parts to what I do. The first is I explore what patterns exist in the data. Oftentimes the data is messy and large so it needs to prepared before it can be useful. For example, I have worked on projects where all of the data we were given were on electronic forms. We first needed to turn it into a table of meaning indicators before anything meaningful could be found. Once the data is in a usable format, I build predictive models or create descriptive visualization to understand what patterns and insights exist in the data. The second part of what I do is make sense of this technical information to a client oftentimes without a statistical background. 3. What have you liked best about majoring in statistics? Statistics has allowed me to combine different interests together in a way I didn't know was possible. I love a challenging logic problem, but I also am a people's person. Statistics allows me to use both technical and soft skills. I also enjoy that I get to meet and work with people with different backgrounds. At Miami some of the people I have worked with range from a county health commissioner to a county coroner. It is a great opportunity to learn from experts of their fields. 4. What do you like to do outside of your studies? I enjoy cooking and painting. Also, I am a board game fanatic. I regularly get my friends together for board game nights. 5. Now that you are graduating, what will you miss the most about Miami? I am going to miss the community at Miami the most. I have met some amazing faculty and students here that have made such a positive impact on my life. 6. What have you learned at a young age that has stuck with you throughout your life? When I was in preschool, my mom told me I had to be friends with everyone and was not allowed to make any enemies. Yes, I know this sounds silly, but it has impacted me even in college. Looking back at the advice, I realize that it has made me feel extremely comfortable talking to new people and speaking in front of a crowd, which are very valued skills in statistics. It also made coming to college and meeting new friends much easier. Simply starting a conversation with strangers has led to some amazing friendships at Miami.
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Q&A with New Faculty in Statistics
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We are delighted to welcome new colleagues in the Department of Statistics. We will introduce these colleagues over the next couple of newsletters. Click the photos below to read more about our new colleagues Qingcong Yuan and Lisa Werwinski.
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|  |  Lisa Werwinski (right) with one of the divers she coaches signing a letter of intent to dive at UK | |
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2018 Student Scholarship in Statistics This has been a productive year of scholarship in our department. We highlight publications and presentations with students. Publications (with student co-authors or by students) - Daawin P., Kim S., and Miljkovic T. (2019), Modeling and Predicting Obesity Prevalence for the United States Population. North American Actuarial Journal. In Press.
- Heard C. and Bailer A.J. (2018) Defying the odds: Exploring the stability of team rankings in the English Premier League. Chance 31: 59-66. doi: 10.1080/09332480.2018.1522215.
Presentations (with student co-authors or by students)
- Daawin P., Kim S., and Miljkovic T. The CBD-O Model for Modeling Obesity Prevalence. Presented at JSM, July 28-August 4, 2018 in Vancouver, Canada and Actuarial Research Conference, August 8-13, 2018, in London, Canada.
- Leiyue Li, Jovanovic M., and Miljkovic, T. Modeling the Tail of Finite Mixtures with Extreme Value Theory: Burr and Inverse Burr Distributions. Presented at the WSDS Conference, October 18-20, 2018, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
- Garrett, R., Estep, R., Rook, N., Schweitzer, B., and Fisher T., Assessing Prediction Error in Traditional Weather Forecasts vs. a Data-Centric Approach. Presented at Joint Statistical Meetings, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
- Schweitzer, B., Estep, R., Rook, N., Garrett, R., and Fisher T., An Analysis on the Accuracy of Weather Forecasts. Presented at Joint Statistical Meetings, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
- Swart, D, Comparing Instructor Created vs. Externally Created Homework Assignments and Their Effects on Exam Scores. ICOTS, July 8-13, 2018, Kyoto, Japan.
- Rook, N., Schweitzer, B., Garrett, R., Estep, R., and Fisher T., A Shiny Way to Explore the Accuracy of Weather Forecast. Presented at the WSDS, October 18-20, 2018, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
- Yu M., Krehbiel M., Thompson S., and Miljkovic, T. Exploration of the Female Actuarial Research Community. Presented at the WSDS Conference, October 18-20, 2018, Cincinnati, OH, USA.
Graduate Research Forum The department was well represented at the GRF with Eric Ansong, Sooyeong Lim, and Xin Zhi all presenting.
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Eric Ansong with mentor Dr. Byran Smucker | |  |
Xin Zhi with mentor Dr. Qingcong Yuan | |
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Stats + Stories Year in Review The Stats+Stories podcast has enjoyed a busy year that included hosting its first contest, the #BetterBayes contest. Winner Steve Ziliak wrote three haiku poems: Bayesian method
Making stuff you partly know
Link with what you don’t. Frequentist methods
Fear the null hypothesis
and large p-value. “It pays to go Bayes”
Epistemologically
Obvious in prior.
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| College of Arts and Science
311 Upham Hall • 100 Bishop Circle • Oxford, OH 45056
513-529-7828 • Fax: 513-529-0989 • statistics@MiamiOH.edu
Copyright © 2019 Miami University.
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