Professor Matt Wand, Distinguished Professor of Statistics in the Statistics and Data Science Group at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, will be visiting the Department of Biostatistics from May 6 through May 17 (inclusive) as part of a 6-month sabbatical. Dr. Wand was an Associate Professor of Biostatistics in the Department from 1997-2002. He will be leading several short courses (on variational approximations with Cai Lab) and seminar talks (with HDSI), across the university during his stay, and will also offer a colloquium in the Department of Biostatistics on mixed models (see below). More about Professor Wand can be found here, here, and here.
Professor Wand is looking forward to catching up with old colleagues, former students, and postdocs, as well as meeting as many new faces as he can while here. He will be available for 1-1 meetings and visits, group lunches and even frisbee, from Friday May 10-Friday May 17, for anyone in the broader Department community who would like to join him (a schedule and signup will be distributed soon in a separate communication).
His colloquium talk in the Department of Biostatistics (date TBA but likely Thursday afternoon, May 16 with happy hour to follow) will be on the following:
“The Generalized Linear Mixed Model Leading Terms”
Generalized linear mixed models were born in the early 1990s as the love child of linear mixed models (1950s) and generalized linear models (1970s). Now, in the 2020s, every day ends with the publication of around 3-4 new papers on the topic. Despite their ever-increasing ubiquity, there has been very little in the way of asymptotic theory for the maximum likelihood estimators of generalized linear mixed model parameters. Apart from simple conveyance of estimator behavior, there are the usual payoffs concerning statistical inference, sample size calculations and optimal design. This talk will describe new results concerning the generalized linear mixed model leading terms, and is joint with Jiming Jiang, Aishwarya Bhaskaran and Luca Maestrini. Ramifications concerning variational approximation will also be mentioned.
Everyone is welcome to join in on any activity/meeting during Professor Wand’s visit to the Department! More info to come.
