Recent & Upcoming Talks

2024
2023

Data Jamboree: Analyzing NYC 311 Service Requests in R

A data jamboree is a party of different computing tools solving the same data science problems. The NYC Open Data of 311 Service Requests contains all 311 requests of NYC from 2010 to present. This talk with demonstrate how to analyze this data using R.

November 4, 2023

12:50 PM – 2:00 PM

ASA Statistical Computing in Action 2023


By Lucy D'Agostino McGowan in Invited Panel

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Design Principles of Data Analysis

The data revolution has sparked greater interest in data analysis practices. While much attention has been given to statistical thinking, another type of complementary thinking that appears in data analysis is design thinking – a problem-solving approach focused on understanding the intended users of a product. When facing a problem, differences arise in how data analysts construct data analyses, including choices in methods, tools, and workflows. These choices impact the analysis outputs and user experience. Therefore, a data analyst’s role can be seen as designing the analysis with specific principles. This webinar will introduce six design principles for data analysis and describe how they can be mapped to data analyses in a quantitative and informative manner. We also provide empirical evidence of variation of these principles within and between data analysts. This will hopefully provide guidance for future work in characterizing the data analytic process.

October 30, 2023

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Teaching Statistics in Health Sciences (ASA) Webinar Series 2023


By Lucy D'Agostino McGowan in Invited Oral Presentation

slides

Design Principles of Data Analysis

The data revolution has sparked greater interest in data analysis practices. While much attention has been given to statistical thinking, another type of complementary thinking that appears in data analysis is design thinking – a problem-solving approach focused on understanding the intended users of a product. When facing a problem, differences arise in how data analysts construct data analyses, including choices in methods, tools, and workflows. These choices impact the analysis outputs and user experience. Therefore, a data analyst’s role can be seen as designing the analysis with specific principles. This webinar will introduce six design principles for data analysis and describe how they can be mapped to data analyses in a quantitative and informative manner. We also provide empirical evidence of variation of these principles within and between data analysts. This will hopefully provide guidance for future work in characterizing the data analytic process.

October 30, 2023

3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

ASA Section on Teaching Statistics in Health Sciences Webinar Series 2023


By Lucy D'Agostino McGowan in Invited Oral Presentation

slides

Demystifying Invited Session Proposals

Invited sessions at conferences provide important opportunities for the exchange of ideas. But how do we get invited? And how can we do the inviting? In this panel, we bring together experienced women in statistics from all career stages to share their tips on organizing invited sessions. Our panelists have planned and participated in numerous successful invited sessions at statistical conferences and have served on program committees to plan and select these sessions on a large scale. This session, sponsored by the Caucus for Women in Statistics, is intended to demystify the invited session proposal process and to empower researchers to submit their ideas in the future.

October 27, 2023

8:45 AM – 10:15 AM

Women in Statistics and Data Sciences 2023


By Ana Maria Ortega-Villa, Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, Pamela Shaw, Suhwon Lee, Tanya Garcia in Invited Panel

Causal Quartet: When Statistics Alone Do Not Tell the Full Story

This talk will delve into two major causal inference obstacles: (1) identifying which variables to account for and (2) assessing the impact of unmeasured variables. The first half of the talk will showcase a Causal Quartet. In the spirit of Anscombe’s Quartet, this is a set of four datasets with identical statistical properties, yet different true causal effects due to differing data generating mechanisms. These simple datasets provide a straightforward example for statisticians to point to when explaining these concepts to collaborators and students. The second half of the talk will focus on how statistical techniques can be leveraged to examine the impact of a potential unmeasured confounder. We will examine sensitivity analyses under several scenarios with varying levels of information about potential unmeasured confounders, introducing the tipr R package, which provides tools for conducting sensitivity analyses in a flexible and accessible manner.

Estimating causal effects: this be madness, yet there is method in it

This talk will delve into two major causal inference obstacles: (1) identifying which variables to account for and (2) assessing the impact of unmeasured variables. The first half of the talk will showcase a Causal Quartet. In the spirit of Anscombe’s Quartet, this is a set of four datasets with identical statistical properties, yet different true causal effects due to differing data generating mechanisms. These simple datasets provide a straightforward example for statisticians to point to when explaining these concepts to collaborators and students. To adjust or not adjust, that is the question; we demonstrate that statistics alone cannot be used to establish which variables to adjust for when estimating causal effects. The second half of the talk will focus on how statistical techniques can be leveraged to address unmeasured confounding. We will examine sensitivity analyses under several scenarios with varying levels of information about potential unmeasured confounders. These techniques will be applied using the tipr R package, which provides tools for conducting sensitivity analyses in a flexible and accessible manner.

Causal Inference in R

In this workshop, we’ll teach the essential elements of answering causal questions in R through causal diagrams, and causal modeling techniques such as propensity scores and inverse probability weighting.

July 11 – 14, 2023

8:00 AM – 5:00 PM

New York R Conference 2023


By Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Malcolm Barrett in Invited Workshop

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