This award will support an NSF/CMBS regional conference to be held at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the summer of 2012 on the topic of statistical model uncertainty and multiplicity. The principal speaker will be Professor James Berger from Duke University. This award will support 29 participants at different stages of their careers.
The conference will address longstanding methodological challenges of statistical model uncertainty and multiplicity along with the recent developments in the area that have been driven by 21st century scientific applications such as complex models and large data sets. The conference aims to attract new researchers to this field by providing a well-organized overview and also intends to strengthen links and collaborations between multiple groups of researchers in the western United States.
Hypothesis testing, model selection, model comparison, model criticism. These are all topics pertaining the uncertainty in the choice of a statistical model and its use for inferential purposes. They play a fundamental role in the theory and the practice of statistical inference, finding widespread use in almost any branch of science. They are key for sound decision making under uncertainty. The goal of the conference was to discuss the theory and the methods behind these topics and to present a comprehensive review of the area, including state of the art metods that are widely scattered in the literature. The main speaker was Professor James Berger, from Duke University. Professor Berger is one of the most influential researchers in the area with lifelong work on the topic. He delivered eight two-hour lectures during the meeting. Professor Susie Bayarri, from the University of Valencia, Spain, delivered two two-hour lectures. Two additional two-hour lectures were given by Professor Bradley Efron, from Stanford University, and Professor Marc Suchard, from the University of California Los Angeles. Professor David Draper, from the University of California Santa Cruz, lead two one-hour sections with discussions of the topics. The conference had 89 registered participants. Most of the participants were students or early career researchers and faculty, based in the US, but we had people from Australia, Canada, England, Korea, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico and Spain. The grant was used to support 34 of those participants. Information about the conference is available on http://cbms-mum.soe.ucsc.edu/
