News

On behalf of WNAR and the WNAR Award Committee, we would like to congratulate Robert Tibshirani as the recipient of the 2024 WNAR Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship. Congratulations, Dr. Tibshirani!

The WNAR of IBS Outstanding impact and Lectureship Award was established in 2021 to recognize an outstanding individual or team, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or citizenship, who has made a significant impact on our society through service and/or research in the development and application of statistical, mathematical, and data science theory and methods in the biomedical or environmental sciences. A significant impact can comprise either a single contribution of extraordinary merit or an outstanding aggregate of contributions that significantly impacts to biosciences and environmental sciences. 

Dr. Robert J. Tibshirani is Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Statistics at Stanford University. Dr. Tibshirani’s nomination package clearly demonstrated his highly impactful research contributions to the fields of biometrics and science at large. The LASSO, his most renowned contribution, has ignited an entirely new realm of research and applications from genomics to finance, and is a cornerstone of the modern data science. WNAR is very proud of its outstanding members, represented by Dr. Tibshirani.

Congratulations as well to our other nominees, all of whom were outstanding and highly impressive in their contributions.

As a recipient of the award, Dr. Tibshirani will give a talk in the WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM on Monday, August 5, 2024, 2pm. More information about the lecture can be found below. 

WNAR members, please plan to submit nomination materials for next year’s award in Fall 2024. We look forward to recognizing our outstanding members with this honor. More information about the award process and upcoming deadlines can be found on the WNAR award website.

WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM

Session 1403 Monday August 5, 2:00-3:50PM
Title:   Cooperative learning and cooperative components analysis

Speaker: Dr. Robert Tibshirani (Stanford Biomedical Science and Statistics)

Abstract:   We propose two methods --- one for supervised learning and the other for unsupervised learning-- both of which make use of an “agreement penalty”.

The first—“Cooperative learning”--- is designed for labelled data with multiple sets of features (“views”). The multiview problem is especially important in biology and medicine, where “-omics” data, such as genomics, proteomics, and radiomics, are measured on a common set of samples. Cooperative learning combines the usual squared-error loss of predictions with an “agreement” penalty to encourage the predictions from different data views to agree. By varying the weight of the agreement penalty, we get a continuum of solutions that include the well-known early and late fusion approaches. 

Cooperative components analysis (“CoCA”) is a new method for unsupervised multi-view analysis.  It identifies the component that simultaneously captures significant within-view variance and exhibits strong cross-view correlation. The challenge of integrating multi-view data is particularly important in biology and medicine, where various types of “-omic” data, ranging from genomics to proteomics, are collected from the same set of samples.
CoCA combines a reconstruction error loss to preserve information within data views and an “agreement penalty” to encourage alignment across views. By balancing the trade-off between these two key components in the objective, CoCA encompasses both principal component analysis and canonical correlation analysis as special cases.

This is joint work with DY Ding, S Li, B Narasimhan, Alden Green and Min Sun.

We look forward to welcoming WNAR 2024 attendees to the joint WNAR/Graybill conference in Fort Collins starting this Sunday, June 9! We would like to highlight two special talks:

• Robert L. Santos, Director of the U.S. Census Bureau, will be giving the WNAR Plenary and Presidential Address "Serving Through Leadership: My Approach to Heading a Federal Statistical Agency" on Monday June 10 at 8:45am.
• Scott Evans, Professor, George Washington University, will be giving the Graybill Keynote "The order of operations is important: It is time to correct the clinical trial arithmetic" on Tuesday June 11, at 8:30am

Abstracts:

Robert L. Santos, Director of the U.S. Census Bureau

Serving Through Leadership: My Approach to Heading a Federal Statistical Agency

This talk will present my approach to leading the largest federal statistical agency in the United States, and how I came to be the leader that I am. By telling my personal and professional story, I'll show how becoming a leader can be much more than learning the art of decision making or learning techniques to herd cats. Based on my personal experience, I believe that virtually every person can grow into a competent, sage leader. Your leadership journey transcends whether you are an introvert or extrovert, whether you are a mathematical statistician, a data scientist or an applied statistician or anything else. Everything about you affects who you are as a leader, and to be effective, you need to bring your "whole self" to the table -- not just your education and technical expertise, but your life experience, culture, values and aspirations. Becoming a leader is necessarily a never-ending growth process, one that has to come from within you.

Dr. Scott Evans, Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and the Director of The Biostatistics Center at Milken Institute School of Public Health of the George Washington University.

The order of operations is important: It is time to correct the clinical trial arithmetic

Typically in clinical trials efficacy and safety are evaluated in silos, one outcome at a time. However this approach: fails to incorporate associations between or the cumulative nature of multiple outcomes in individual patients, suffers from competing risk complexities during interpretation of individual outcomes, fails to recognize important gradations of patient responses, suboptimally evaluates treatment effect heterogeneity based on a single endpoint rather than benefit:risk considerations, and since efficacy and safety analyses are often conducted on different populations, generalizability is unclear. In recognition of this, the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) recently recommended: (1) transitioning benefit-risk evaluation as a post-hoc exercise to incorporating benefit-risk considerations into clinical trial design, and (2) a pragmatic patient-centric approach to benefit-risk assessment to ensure proper evaluation of the benefits and harms as experienced by patients. The desirability of outcome ranking (DOOR) is a paradigm for the design, analysis, and interpretation of clinical trials based on a comprehensive patient-centric benefit-risk evaluation developed to address these limitations and the CIOMS recommendations, and advance clinical trial science. In this paradigm outcomes are used to analyze patients rather than patients being used to analyze outcomes. The experiences of trial participants in different treatment arms are compared by the desirability of the overall patient outcome, increasing pragmatism and addressing the most important “real world” question to aid clinical decision-making: how do resulting patient experiences, when comprehensively considering benefits and harms, compare between therapeutic alternatives? The DOOR paradigm, and freely available online tools for design and robust analyses are discussed, and illustrated using examples.

Congratulations to Kyle Conniff who is our first awardee of the WNAR Indigenous Student Travel Award!  Kyle Conniff is a Ph.D. candidate of Statistics at the University of California Irvine, and he is a member of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin.

WNAR offers multiple travel awards for Indigenous students from within the WNAR region to attend our annual conference. Awards up to $1,000 are available for conference travel and lodging related expenses. Eligible students include Indigenous peoples of North America and the Pacific Islands. To apply for the 2025 meeting, please send a letter outlining your connection to Indigenous peoples and why you are looking forward to attending the WNAR annual conference to: wnar@wnar.org.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the WNAR election for 2024 positions.

Congratulations to WNAR President-Elect David Rocke, Program Coordinator Wen Zhou, and Representatives-at-Large Lindsay Renfro and Marie Auger-Methe.

Special thanks go out to outgoing WNAR Past-President Gary Chan, Program Coordinator Lingling An, and outgoing Representatives-at-Large Charlotte Gard and Julia Palacios for their efforts and dedication to WNAR.

Congratulations to the 25 students who participated in the 2023 WNAR Student Award Competition, and to our winners of the written paper and oral presentations:

WINNER PAPER AWARD

Soumik Purkayastha, University of Michigan, Asymmetric Predictability: an information theoretic approach to causal inference

RUNNER UP PAPER AWARD

Norihiro Suzuki, Tokyo Medical University, A New Criterion for Determining a Cutoff Value Based on the Biases of the Incidence Proportions in the Presence of Outcome Misclassifications

WINNER PRESENTATION AWARD

Michael Christensen, Duke University, A Dynamic Model Characterizing Bird Migration

RUNNERS UP PRESENTATION AWARD

Elizabeth Wynn, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Simulating Longitudinal Single-cell RNA Sequencing Data

Seth Temple, University of Washington, Robust statistical inference for very recent and strong incomplete selective sweeps

Soumik Purkayastha, University of Michigan, Asymmetric Predictability: an information theoretic approach to causal inference

The students were honored at the banquet at the 2023 WNAR Annual Meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. All WNAR participants received travel awards, and winners received additional monetary awards and certificates. We give special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Charlotte Gard of New Mexico State University, and the judges on the committee who read papers and observed oral presentations: Fang Chen (SAS); Shuai Chen (University of California, Davis); Chad He (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center); Alexander Kaizer (Colorado School of Public Health); Eric Kawaguchi (University of Southern California); Kayleigh Keller (Colorado State University); Jane Lange (Oregon Health & Science University); Hong Li (University of California, Davis); Yu-Ru Su (Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute); Brandie Wagner (Colorado School of Public Health); Brian Williamson (Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute); Katie Wilson (University of Washington); Shangyuan Ye (Oregon Health & Science University); Guo Yu (University of California, Santa Barbara); Qian Zhao (Stanford University).

Please encourage your students to participate in the competition in 2024! Abstracts and papers will be due in the late winter. More information can be found on the Student Paper Award website.

On behalf of WNAR and the WNAR Award Committee, we would like to congratulate Steve Horvath as the recipient of the 2023 WNAR Outstanding Impact Award and Lectureship. Congratulations, Dr. Horvath!

The WNAR of IBS Outstanding impact and Lectureship Award was established in 2021 to recognize an outstanding individual or team, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or citizenship, who has made a significant impact on our society through service and/or research in the development and application of statistical, mathematical, and data science theory and methods in the biomedical or environmental sciences. A significant impact can comprise either a single contribution of extraordinary merit or an outstanding aggregate of contributions that significantly impacts to biosciences and environmental sciences. 

Dr. Steve Horvath is a Principal Investigator at the Altos Labs San Diego Institute of Science. Prior to joining Altos, he was a Professor of Human Genetics and Biostatistics at UCLA. Dr. Horvath’s nomination package clearly demonstrated his highly impactful research contributions to the fields of bioinformatics and aging biology, especially for his development of the widely used weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA) method for studying biological networks and for his revolutionary development of the highly accurate and widely used epigenetic clocks, also known as Horvath’s clocks, for age estimation based on DNA methylation data. WNAR is very proud of its outstanding members, represented by Dr. Horvath.

Congratulations as well to our other nominees, all of whom were outstanding and highly impressive in their contributions.

As a recipient of the award, Dr. Horvath will give a talk in the WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM on Tuesday, August 8, 2023, 2pm. More information about the lecture can be found below. 

WNAR members, please plan to submit nomination materials for next year’s award. We look forward to recognizing our outstanding members with this honor. More information about the award process can be found on the WNAR award website.

WNAR Outstanding Impact Award Lecture at the JSM

Session 1287 August 8, 2:00-3:50PM
Title:   Epigenetic Clocks and Weighted Correlation Network Analysis

Speaker: Steve Horvath (Department of Biostatistics, University of California, Los Angeles; Altos Labs)

Abstract:   In this presentation, I will discuss two prevalent techniques employed in biostatistics and bioinformatics. First, I will provide an overview of weighted correlation network analysis (WGCNA), a systems biology approach used to delineate correlation patterns among variables. WGCNA enables the identification of clusters (modules) of highly correlated genes, the summarization of these clusters via module eigengene or intramodular hub gene, the establishment of relationships between modules and external sample traits (utilizing eigengene network methodology), and the computation of module membership measures. These techniques have proven successful across various biological contexts. Specifically, I will discuss a recent application of WGCNA to cytosine methylation data gathered by the Mammalian Methylation Consortium.

The second method discussed is referred to as epigenetic clocks, which serve as genomic aging indicators based on cytosine methylation patterns. I will outline three successive generations of epigenetic clocks that are designed to predict age in humans, assess human mortality risk, and estimate age across various mammalian species, respectively.

Dr. Horvath and WNAR President Elizabeth Juarez-Colunga at the JSM session, August 2023

Save the date for future WNAR meetings. More information will be added to the Meetings page.

• June 18-21, 2023, Anchorage, Alaska

• • Scientific program chair: Audrey Hendricks, University of Colorado Denver

  • Local organizer: Jiaqi Huang, Alaska Department of Fish and Game

  • Chair of Student Award Committee: Charlotte Gard, New Mexico State University

• June 9-12, 2024, Fort Collins, Colorado, joint with the Graybill Conference

• • Local organizer: Rick Zhou, Colorado State University

Forty-two students participated in the student paper competition at the 2022 WNAR/IMS conference (virtually).

There were two winners (tied) in the written category: Anna Neufeld, University of Washington ("Inference after latent variable estimation for single-cell RNA sequencing data") and Shuting Shen, Harvard University ("Fast distributed Principal Component Analysis for large scale federated data").

There were also two winners (tied) in the oral category: Larry Han, Harvard University ("Privacy-preserving and communication-efficient causal inference for hospital quality measurement") and Tianyu Zhang, University of Washington, ("Regression in Tensor Product Spaces by the Method of Sieves").

The students were honored at special zoom event and awardees will receive certificates and monetary awards. We give a special thanks to the chair of the student paper competition, Fan Yang, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, and the rest of the committee: Jarrett Barber, Fei Gao, Kayleigh Keller, Lihua Lei, John Rice, Subodh Selukar, Krithika Suresh, Katherine Wilson, Fan Xia, Fuyong Xing, Fan Yang, Ting Ye, Ying Zhou.

Congratulations to all!