On June 17 and 18 the Division of Biostatistics held its first ever virtual poster presentations during its annual Biostatistics Research Day. There were 45 posters presented over the two-day event by graduate students, primarily from Dalla Lana School of Public Health (DLSPH), but also from elsewhere in Canada. The event, chaired by Tony Panzarella (MSc program director and assistant professor of Biostatistics), was organized by a committee that included core and status faculty, administrative staff, student alumni, and current students. A list of the organizing committee members, abstracts, and other program details can be found online at http://sorataba.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-SORA-TABA-DLSPH-Biostatistics-Research-Day-Poster-Presentations.pdf. A panel of judges was tasked with evaluating each poster presentation and selecting three award winners. The winners, announced shortly after the final session, were: 1st prize: Yuan Bian “Hypothesis Testing in Joint Models for Longitudinal and Time-to-event Outcomes;” 2nd prize: Pai-Shan Cheng “Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs for the Management of Pain Due to Knee and Hip Osteoarthritis: Network Meta-Analysis with Gaussian Random Walk Model;” and 3rd prize:  Boxi Lin “Genome-wide Association Study of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Infectious in Cystic Fibrosis.” Honourable mentions went to Madeline Ward, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Guelph  and Linda Luu, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto.

Tony Panzarella, President of SORA and Chair, Organizing Committee

The awards are named after professor emeritus, Paul Corey. Professor Corey thanked everyone involved and commented how impressed he was by the high quality of the presentations. Professor Wendy Lou, division head of Biostatistics at DLSPH, thanked Professor Corey for his support, and the organizing committee for their hard work. The poster presentations are usually held in-person as part of the annual joint event of the DLSPH with the Southern Ontario Regional Association (SORA) of the Statistical Society of Canada and The Applied Biostatistics Association (TABA): SORA-TABA-DLSPH Workshop and DLSPH Biostatistical Research Day. This year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poster presentations were held virtually.

Paul Corey, Professor Emeritus

This year’s workshop will also be held virtually over two days, Thursday, August 20 and Friday, August 21. The workshop “Statistical Machine Learning for Biomedical Data “ will be presented by Dr. Noah Simon (PhD supervisor Dr. Rob Tibshirani) from the University of Washington. Registration for the workshop  will open soon. See http://sorataba.org/ for details.

Noah Simon, SORA-TABA 2020 Workshop Presenter

Abstract:

We will present several supervised learning methods that can be applied to biomedical big data: We will cover penalized approaches to regression and classification; as well as support vector machines, tree-based methods, and deep learning.

We will consider the analysis of "high-dimensional Omics" datasets. These data are typically characterized by a huge number of molecular measurements (such as genes) and a relatively small number of samples (such as patients). In addition, we will discuss the use of these tools in the development of prognostic and predictive biomarkers.

Throughout the course, we will focus on common pitfalls in the supervised analysis of biomedical big data and how to avoid them. The course will include interactive discussions/challenge questions to help participants actively engage with applying these tools in biomedical scenarios.

This course assumes some previous exposure to linear regression and statistical hypothesis testing.