Roadtrip

This past Saturday the all the ATS Stat Consultants piled into the Statmobile and went on a roadtrip to the 26th Annual Workshop in Applied Statistics put on by the Southern California Chapter of the American Statistical Association. Fortunately, it was a short drive since the meeting was held on the UCLA campus in the Bradley International Center.

This year's speaker was Bengt Muthén talking on recent developments in statistical analysis with latent variables. The presentation went into how the idea of latent variables captures a wide variety of statistical concepts, including random effects, sources of variation in hierarchical data, frailties, missing data, finite mixtures, latent classes and clusters.

The presentation began a little after 9 am with cross sectional models and finished around 4:30 pm somewhere in longitudinal models. The presentation moved along nicely thanks in part to Professors Muthén's subtle Swedish sense of humor. Although there was no hands-on component the crowd got into the swing of things during the lively question and answer periods. Even with a whole day discussing these topics the material covered was only a fraction of what Professor Muthén usually covers in his five-day workshop.

I'm sure the conference would have run much later but many wanted to get home to see the UCLA-Florida basketball game. Too bad the game didn't go as well as the conference did.

pbe