Michael L. Stein.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 35, Number 1, 31--41.

Abstract:
Climate science is a field that is arguably both data-rich and data-poor. Data rich in that huge and quickly increasing amounts of data about the state of the climate are collected every day. Data poor in that important aspects of the climate are still undersampled, such as the deep oceans and some characteristics of the upper atmosphere. Data rich in that modern climate models can produce climatological quantities over long time periods with global coverage, including quantities that are difficult to measure and under conditions for which there is no data presently. Data poor in that the correspondence between climate model output to the actual climate, especially for future climate change due to human activities, is difficult to assess. The scope for fruitful interactions between climate scientists and statisticians is great, but requires serious commitments from researchers in both disciplines to understand the scientific and statistical nuances arising from the complex relationships between the data and the real-world problems. This paper describes a small fraction of some of the intellectual challenges that occur at the interface between climate science and statistics, including inferences for extremes for processes with seasonality and long-term trends, the use of climate model ensembles for studying extremes, the scope for using new data sources for studying space-time characteristics of environmental processes and a discussion of non-Gaussian space-time process models for climate variables. The paper concludes with a call to the statistical community to become more engaged in one of the great scientific and policy issues of our time, anthropogenic climate change and its impacts.

Junhui Cai, Avishai Mandelbaum, Chaitra H. Nagaraja, Haipeng Shen, Linda Zhao.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 4, 669--691.

Abstract:
Statisticians are finding their place in the emerging field of data science. However, many issues considered “new” in data science have long histories in statistics. Examples of using statistical thinking are illustrated, which range from exploratory data analysis to measuring uncertainty to accommodating nonrandom samples. These examples are then applied to service networks, baseball predictions and official statistics.

Alessandro Rinaldo, Ryan J. Tibshirani, Larry Wasserman.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 4, 599--603.

Abstract:
What is the meaning of a regression parameter? Why is this the de facto standard object of interest for statistical inference? These are delicate issues, especially when the model is misspecified. We argue that focusing on predictive quantities may be a desirable alternative.

Laura Anderlucci, Angela Montanari, Cinzia Viroli.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 2, 280--300.

Abstract:
In this paper, we retrace the recent history of statistics by analyzing all the papers published in five prestigious statistical journals since 1970, namely: The Annals of Statistics , Biometrika , Journal of the American Statistical Association , Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B and Statistical Science . The aim is to construct a kind of “taxonomy” of the statistical papers by organizing and clustering them in main themes. In this sense being identified in a cluster means being important enough to be uncluttered in the vast and interconnected world of the statistical research. Since the main statistical research topics naturally born, evolve or die during time, we will also develop a dynamic clustering strategy, where a group in a time period is allowed to migrate or to merge into different groups in the following one. Results show that statistics is a very dynamic and evolving science, stimulated by the rise of new research questions and types of data.

Lei Liu, Ya-Chen Tina Shih, Robert L. Strawderman, Daowen Zhang, Bankole A. Johnson, Haitao Chai.

Source: Statistical Science, Volume 34, Number 2, 253--279.

Abstract:
Zero-inflated nonnegative continuous (or semicontinuous) data arise frequently in biomedical, economical, and ecological studies. Examples include substance abuse, medical costs, medical care utilization, biomarkers (e.g., CD4 cell counts, coronary artery calcium scores), single cell gene expression rates, and (relative) abundance of microbiome. Such data are often characterized by the presence of a large portion of zero values and positive continuous values that are skewed to the right and heteroscedastic. Both of these features suggest that no simple parametric distribution may be suitable for modeling such type of outcomes. In this paper, we review statistical methods for analyzing zero-inflated nonnegative outcome data. We will start with the cross-sectional setting, discussing ways to separate zero and positive values and introducing flexible models to characterize right skewness and heteroscedasticity in the positive values. We will then present models of correlated zero-inflated nonnegative continuous data, using random effects to tackle the correlation on repeated measures from the same subject and that across different parts of the model. We will also discuss expansion to related topics, for example, zero-inflated count and survival data, nonlinear covariate effects, and joint models of longitudinal zero-inflated nonnegative continuous data and survival. Finally, we will present applications to three real datasets (i.e., microbiome, medical costs, and alcohol drinking) to illustrate these methods. Example code will be provided to facilitate applications of these methods.

About one in 12 Manitoba jobs disappeared during the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Statistics Canada's latest monthly survey of Canadian employment.

Notional amounts of OTC derivatives rose to $640 trillion at end-June 2019. This is up from $544 trillion at end-2018 and the highest level since 2014. It marks a continuation of the trend increase evident since end-2016. The gross market value of OTC derivatives, summing positive and negative values, also rose, from $9.7 trillion to $12.1 trillion, led by increases in euro interest rate derivative contracts. The lastest semiannual data benefit from the addition of more comprehensive information for smaller dealers collected as part of the BIS Triennial Survey. Dealers in emerging market economies (EMEs) accounted for 9% of the outstanding notional amounts of foreign exchange and commodity derivatives globally at end-June 2019, up from 7% at end-June 2016.

The BIS Statistical Bulletin is published quarterly and summarises all BIS statistics in tabular form. It includes introductions to each data set and a glossary of statistical terms.

Global cross-border bank claims continued to expand rapidly, growing at 9% year on year. As in previous quarters, the expansion was mainly due to claims on the non-bank sector, which grew at 12% year on year. The growth in claims on non-bank financial institutions was particularly strong (+17%). European banks' cross-border lending, which went through a prolonged contraction after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-09, has been expanding again since the start of 2018.

The debt securities statistics provide quarterly data on borrowing in money and bond markets, distinguishing between international and domestic markets.

The exchange-traded derivatives statistics provide monthly data on the turnover, and quarterly data on the open interest, of foreign exchange and interest rate futures and options. They refer to notional amounts, which enables comparisons of levels and trends in activity across different markets.

The annual growth rate of global cross-border bank claims fell to 6%, down from 9% at end-September 2019. The short-term share of foreign banks' claims, a key indicator of external vulnerability, is elevated for a number of borrowing emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). Borrowers in EMDEs had untapped credit lines of $610 billion, or roughly 10% of the stock of global foreign claims on EMDEs at end-2019. Saudi Arabia joined the reporting population for the locational banking statistics (LBS) with data starting from Q4 2017, bringing the number of countries reporting these data to 48.

The locational banking statistics provide quarterly data on the outstanding claims and liabilities of internationally active banks located in reporting countries against counterparties residing in more than 200 countries. They capture the currency composition of banks' balance sheets and the geographical breakdown of their counterparties.

The consolidated banking statistics provide quarterly data on the worldwide consolidated positions of banks headquartered in reporting countries. They are designed to analyse the exposure of internationally active banks of different nationalities to individual countries and sectors.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, there are so many numbers flying around, it's hard to keep track. Here, we'll do our best to keep track for you, with new charts updated daily and the context surrounding the data.

Notional amounts of OTC derivatives rose from $544 trillion at end-December 2018 to $559 trillion at end-December 2019. This, however, corresponds to a significant fall over the last six months, which could be at least partly attributed to seasonal factors. The seasonal pattern in the data, whereby end-June values tend typically to be larger than end-of-year values, appears strongest in positions vis-à-vis central counterparties. Such end-of-year contractions can occur if dealer banks and/or their clients shrink their outstanding notional derivative positions for regulatory and financial reporting purposes. Contracts denominated in non-G4 currencies (ie excluding USD, EUR, JPY and GBP) have grown in size for both interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives, even though those denominated in US dollars remain the largest segment.

Cynthia L. Ogden
Jan 1, 2002; 109:45-60
ARTICLES

Source: www.geekwire.com - Friday, May 08, 2020
University of Washington researchers work with the virus that causes COVID-19 in a restricted lab. (UW Medicine via YouTube) In a newly published study, a University of Washington researcher argues that the eventual death toll from COVID-19 could be more than twice as high as the figures currently being discussed. The study was written by Anirban Basu, a health economist and statistician who’s the director of UW’s Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy and Economics Institute, also known as the CHOICE Institute . In his research paper , published online Thursday by the journal Health Affairs, Basu acknowledges there’s still lots of uncertainty surrounding the fatality rate for the disease caused by the coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2. But he says there’s evidence that the U.S. death toll could amount to 350,000 to 1.2 million. Anirban Basu is the Stergachis Family Endowed Director of the CHOICE Institute at the University of Washington’s School of Pharmacy. (UW Photo) “This is a staggering number, which can only be brought down with sound public health measures,” Basu said in an interview with MedicalResearch.com . The latest projections from UW’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimate that the U.S. death toll due to COVID-19 will amount to nearly 135,000 by Aug. 4. IHME’s projections are closely watched (and occasionally lowballed) by the White House. “We’ll be at 100,000” or 110,000 deaths, President Donald Trump to

Diego Costa scored the fastest-ever UEFA Super Cup goal to help Atlético win in 2018: all the records.

News outlets share stats and graphs that they source from public data. It takes data literacy skills to critique the stats you see, and investigate more.

The post A skeptic's guide to statistics in the media appeared first on The SAS Dummy.

Following the passage of House Bill 114, the Delaware Public Archives will service Delaware marriage certificates up to 1968.

The post Service Notice: Vital Statistics Marriage Certificates appeared first on Delaware Public Archives - State of Delaware.

As noted in white papers, posts on the Team Specman Blog, and the Specman documentation, IntelliGen is a totally new stimulus generator than the original "Pgen" and, as a result, there is some amount of effort needed to migrate an existing verification environment to fully leverage the power of IntelliGen.  One of the main steps in migrating code is running the linters on your code and adressing the issues highlighted. 

Included below is a simple utility you can include in your environment that allows you to collect some valuable statistics about your code base to allow you to better gauge the amount of work that might be required to migrate from Pgen to IntelliGen.  The ICFS statistics reported are of particular benefit as the utility not only identifies the approximate number of ICFSs in the environment, it also breaks the total number down according to generation contexts (structs/units and gen-on-the-fly statements) allowing you to better focus your migration efforts. 

IMPORTANT: Sometimes a given environment can trigger a large number of IntelliGen linting messages right off the bat.  Don't let this freak you out!  This does not mean that migration will be a long effort as quite often some slight changes to an environment remove a large number of identified issues.  I recently encountered a situation where a simple change to three locations in the environment, removed 500+ ICFSs!

The methods included in the utility can be used to report information on the following:
- Number of e modules
- Number of lines in the environment (including blanks and comments)
- Number and type of IntelliGen Guidelines linting messages
- Number of Inconsistently Connected Field Sets (ICFSs)
- Number of ICFS contexts and how many ICFSs per context
- Number of soft..select overlays found in the envioronment
- Number of Laces identified in the environment

To use the code below, simply load it before/after loading e-code and then
you can execute any of the following methods:

- sys.print_file_stats()             : prints # of lines and files
- sys.print_constraint_stats()   : prints # of constraints in the environment
- sys.print_guideline_stats()    : prints # of each type of linting message
- sys.print_icfs_stats()            : prints # of ICFSs, contexts and #ICFS/context
- sys.print_soft_select_stats() : prints # of soft select overlay issues
- sys.print_lace_stats()           : *Only works for SPMNv6.2s4 and later* prints # of laces identified in the environment

Each of the above calls to methods produces it's own log files (stored in the current working directory) containing relevant information for more detailed analysis.
- file_stats_log.elog : Output of "show modules" command
- constraint_log.elog : Output of the "show constraint" command
- guidelines_log.elog : Output of "gen lint -g" (with notification set to MAX_INT in order to get all warnings)
- icfs_log.elog       : Output of "gen lint -i" command
- soft_select_log.elog: Output of the "gen lint -s" command
- lace_log.elog       : Output of the "show lace" command

Happy generating!

Corey Goss

Despite an overall drop in the number of claims last year, statistics for 2008-09 released by the Tribunals Service last week reveal that claim numbers remain high at 151,028 and the majority of claim types rose in that period. The latest statisti...

The annual report published by BIS on trade union membership has just been published and contains new statistics for 2010. As in previous years, it tracks an ongoing decline in trade union membership levels and, similarly, a fall in the number of em...

New: 85 confirmed cases (reported from 9 Lusaka, 76 Nakonde); 3 deaths (reported from 2 Lusaka, 1...

1

By some estimates, the digital economy now accounts for trillions of dollars. But policymakers and companies still lack the data needed to fully understand it.

Basic Statistics 2020 presents development indicators for 46 economies in Asia and the Pacific, including new data on economic, environmental, and social indicators used globally to track progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

Basic Statistics 2020 presents development indicators for 46 economies in Asia and the Pacific, including new data on economic, environmental, and social indicators used globally to track progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

Aug 18 - Lauren Bush Lauren discusses the latest findings on hunger in the U.S. from a survey conducted by an organization she represents. The granddaughter of President George H.W. Bush and niece of President George W. Bush also discusses her famous family.

Everything from genetic tests to immigration numbers is full of shaky statistics. David Spiegelhalter's new podcast helps separate the factual from the flaky

Age-at-onset is one of the critical traits in cohort studies of age-related diseases. Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of age-at-onset traits can provide more insights into genetic effects on disease progression and transitions between stages. Moreover, proportional hazards (or Cox) regression models can achieve higher statistical power in a cohort study than a case-control trait using logistic regression. Although mixed-effects models are widely used in GWAS to correct for sample dependence, application of Cox mixed-effects models (CMEMs) to large-scale GWAS is so far hindered by intractable computational cost. In this work, we propose COXMEG, an efficient R package for conducting GWAS of age-at-onset traits using CMEMs. COXMEG introduces fast estimation algorithms for general sparse relatedness matrices including, but not limited to, block-diagonal pedigree-based matrices. COXMEG also introduces a fast and powerful score test for dense relatedness matrices, accounting for both population stratification and family structure. In addition, COXMEG generalizes existing algorithms to support positive semidefinite relatedness matrices, which are common in twin and family studies. Our simulation studies suggest that COXMEG, depending on the structure of the relatedness matrix, is orders of magnitude computationally more efficient than coxme and coxph with frailty for GWAS. We found that using sparse approximation of relatedness matrices yielded highly comparable results in controlling false-positive rate and retaining statistical power for an ethnically homogeneous family-based sample. By applying COXMEG to a study of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with a Late-Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Family Study from the National Institute on Aging sample comprising 3456 non-Hispanic whites and 287 African Americans, we identified the APOE 4 variant with strong statistical power (P = 1e–101), far more significant than that reported in a previous study using a transformed variable and a marginal Cox model. Furthermore, we identified novel SNP rs36051450 (P = 2e–9) near GRAMD1B, the minor allele of which significantly reduced the hazards of AD in both genders. These results demonstrated that COXMEG greatly facilitates the application of CMEMs in GWAS of age-at-onset traits.

Tree structures, showing hierarchical relationships and the latent structures between samples, are ubiquitous in genomic and biomedical sciences. A common question in many studies is whether there is an association between a response variable measured on each sample and the latent group structure represented by some given tree. Currently, this...

A logistic regression model and a bivariate statistical analysis were used in this paper to evaluate the groundwater recharge susceptibility. The approach is based on the assessment of the relationship involving groundwater recharge and parameters that influence this hydrological process. Surface parameters and aquifer-related parameters were evaluated as thematic map layers using ArcGIS. Then, a weighted-rating method was adopted to categorize each parameter's map. To assess the role of each parameter in the aquifer recharge, a logistic regression model and a bivariate statistical analysis were applied to the Guenniche phreatic aquifer (Tunisia). Models are explored to establish a map showing the aquifer recharge susceptibility. The code Modflow was used to simulate the consequence of the recharge. The recharge amount was introduced in the model and was tested to verify the recharge effect on the hydraulic head for the two models. The obtained results reveal that the recharge as mapped in the bivariate statistical model has a minor impact on the hydraulic head. Results of the logistic regression model are more significant as the hydraulic head is widely affected. This model provides good results in mapping the spatial distribution of the aquifer recharge susceptibility.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:

Brain metastases are a common finding on brain MRI. However, the factors that dictate their size and distribution are incompletely understood. Our aim was to discover a statistical model that can account for the size distribution of parenchymal metastases in the brain as measured on contrast-enhanced MR imaging.

APRIL saw 20.5 million job losses in the United States, the biggest rise in the jobless rate since the Great Depression.

Data leaks of this magnitude are virtually unheard of in Canada

Read our live coronavirus updates HERE Coronavirus: The symptoms

Statistics Canada reported Friday that the economy lost nearly two million jobs in April and the unemployment rate soared to 13.0 per cent as the full force of the pandemic hit.

Is Australia flattening the curve? We bring together all the latest Covid-19 confirmed cases, maps, stats and graphs from NSW, Victoria, Queensland, SA, WA, Tasmania, ACT and NT to get a broad picture of the Australian outbreak and track the impact of government response.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s daily coronavirus email
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Due to the difference in reporting times between states, territories and the federal government, it can be difficult to get a current picture of how many confirmed cases of coronavirus there are in Australia.

Here, we’ve brought together all the figures in one place, along with comparisons with other countries.

Statistics Canada has launched an investigation after a media outlet reported its latest job-loss figures more than a half hour before the data was officially released.

Canada lost almost two million jobs during the month of April, a record high, as the impact of COVID-19 on the economy made itself known.

“Today’s report showing violent crime declined in 2009 is an encouraging sign that our nation continues to make progress in the fight against crime," said Attorney General Holder.

This fourth annual report to Congress describes efforts to collect and improve data on crime and justice in Indian country, as required by the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010. The report details the number of tribal law enforcement agencies reporting crime data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. It describes BJS’s first National Survey of Tribal Court Systems which will collect data on tribal courts in the lower 48 states and Alaska covering 566 tribes

In 1969, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) created official development assistance (ODA) as a measure of foreign aid effort. To qualify as ODA, transactions had to be "concessional in character,” i.e., to give something of value away. In 1970 the U.N. set a target for ODA of 0.7 percent of donors’ national income. The…

Analysis bridges differences between various climate change models to predict North American climate change with high certainty. Will skeptics finally be convinced?