Today I attended the funeral of Peter Hall, one of the finest mathematical statisticians ever to walk the earth and easily the best from Australia. One of the most remarkable things about Peter was his astonishing productivity, with over 600 papers. As I sat in the audience I realised that many of the people there were probably coauthors of papers with Peter, and I wondered how many statisticians in the world would have been his coauthors or second-degree co-authors.

In mathematics, people calculate Erdős numbers — the “collaborative distance” between Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. An Erdős number of 1 means you wrote a paper with Erdős; an Erdős number of 2 means you wrote a paper with someone who has an Erdős number of 1; and so on. My Erdős number is 3, measured in two different ways:

• via Peter Brockwell / Kai-Lai Chung / Paul Erdös
• via J. Keith Ord / Peter C Fishburn / Paul Erdös

It seems appropriate that we should compute Hall numbers in statistics. Mine is 1, as I was lucky enough to have coauthored two papers with Peter Hall. You can compute your own Hall number here. Just put your own surname in the second author field.

# ACEMS Business Analytics Prize 2016

We have established a new annual prize for research students at Monash University in the general area of business analytics, funded by the Australian Centre of Excellence in Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS). The rules of the award are listed below.

1. The student must have submitted a paper to a high quality journal or refereed conference on some topic in the general area of business analytics, computational statistics or data visualization.
2. Up to \$3000 will be awarded to the student to assist with research expenses subject to the approval of the relevant supervisor.
3. Applications should include the submitted paper, along with a brief statement (no more than 200 words) on how they intend to spend the money. Applications should be emailed to econometrics@monash.edu by 31 March 2016.
4. The winning student will be selected by a panel consisting of Di Cook, Rob Hyndman, Catherine Forbes and Geoff Webb.
5. Any HDR student currently enrolled at Monash University is eligible to apply.

# Farewell Peter Hall (1951-2016)

Peter Hall passed away on Saturday after a long battle with illness over the last couple of years. No statistician will need reminding of Peter’s extensive contributions to the field. He had over 500 published papers, and had won every major award available, many of them listed on his Wikipedia page. Continue reading →

# Starting a career in data science

I’m writing to you asking for advice on how to start a career in Data Science. Other professions seem a bit more straight forward, in that accountants for example simply look for Internships and ways into companies from there. From my understanding, the nature of careers in data science seem to be on a project-to-project basis. I’m not sure how to get my foot stuck in the door.

I am expecting to finish degree by Semester 1 2016. In my job searching so far, I have only encountered positions which require 3+ years of previous data analysis experience and have not seen any “entry-level” data analysis positions or graduate data positions. What is the nature of entry level recruitment in this industry?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Aran

# Making data analysis easier

Di Cook and I are organizing a workshop on “Making data analysis easier” for 18-19 February 2016.

We are calling it WOMBAT2016, which an acronym for Workshop Organized by the Monash Business Analytics Team. Appropriately, it will be held at the Melbourne Zoo. Our plan is to make these workshops an annual event.

Some details are available on the workshop website. Key features are:

• Hadley Wickham is our keynote speaker. He has been instrumental in changing the way we think about data analysis, and providing new tools for tidying, rearranging, summarising and plotting data. His R packages (including tidyr, dplyr, ggplot2, and ggvis) are very widely used.
• Other speakers include Phil Brierley, Eugene Dubossarsky, Heike Hofmann, Thomas Lumley, Andrew Robinson, Elle Saber, Carson Sievert, Zoe van Havre, Geoff Webb, Yanchang Zhao, as well as Di and me.
• The numbers are limited to a total of 100 with a quota on students, academics and people from business/industry. The aim is to have a good mix of people from different backgrounds to encourage productive discussions and mutual learning.
• Register on Eventbrite.
• We also have some places available for contributing speakers (15 minute talks). If you would like to do a contributed talk, you will need to email us a title and abstract by 15 January. We will notify you if your peer-reviewed abstract is successful by 29 January.

If you miss out on the workshop, you can still hear Hadley speak. Data Science Melbourne will host a meetup featuring him in the evening of Monday 22 February 2016.

# RStudio just keeps getting better

RStudio has been a life-changer for the way I work, and for how I teach data analysis. I still have a couple of minor frustrations with it, but they are slowly disappearing as RStudio adds features.

I use dual monitors and I like to code on one monitor and have the console and plots on the other monitor. Otherwise I see too little context, and long lines get wrapped making the code harder to read. So I was very excited to see that RStudio has provided a great Christmas present this year, with source code panes able to be split off into separate windows.

You need the preview version as the feature hasn’t yet found its way into the release version. The features are explained in this help file, in which I also discovered the amazing shortcut Ctrl + . to jump to a function definition. I’ve no idea how long that has been in RStudio, but I’ll be using it a lot.

Now if they would only introduce the ability to select columns for cut/copy/paste …

The github page for the forecast package currently shows the following information

# The hidden benefits of open-source software

I’ve been having discussions with colleagues and university administration about the best way for universities to manage home-grown software.

The traditional business model for software is that we build software and sell it to everyone willing to pay. Very often, that leads to a software company spin-off that has little or nothing to do with the university that nurtured the development. Think MATLAB, S-Plus, Minitab, SAS and SPSS, all of which grew out of universities or research institutions. This model has repeatedly been shown to stifle research development, channel funds away from the institutions where the software was born, and add to research costs for everyone.

I argue that the open-source model is a much better approach both for research development and for university funding. Under the open-source model, we build software, and make it available for anyone to use and adapt under an appropriate licence. This approach has many benefits that are not always appreciated by university administrators. Continue reading →

# ODI looking for young postgrad statisticians

The Overseas Development Institute Fellowship Scheme sends young postgraduate statisticians (and economists) to work in the public sectors of developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific on two-year contracts. This is a great way to develop skills and gain experience working within a developing country’s government. And you get to live in a fascinating place!

The application process for the 2016-2018 Fellowship Scheme is now open. Students are advised to apply before 17 December 2015 for a chance to be part of the ODI Fellowship Scheme.

Essential criteria:

• degree in statistics, economics, or a related field
• ability to commit to a two-year assignment

Application is via the online application form.

# Big Data for Official Statistics Competition

This is a new competition being organized by EuroStat. The first phase involves nowcasting economic indicators at national and European level including unemployment, HICP, Tourism and Retail Trade and some of their variants.

The main goal of the competition is to discover promising methodologies and data sources that could, now or in the future, be used to improve the production of official statistics in the European Statistical System.

The organizers seem to have been encouraged by the success of Kaggle and other data science competition platforms. Unfortunately, they have chosen not to give any prizes other than an invitation to give a conference presentation or poster, which hardly seems likely to attract many good participants.

The deadline for registration is 10 January 2016. The duration of the competition is roughly a year (including about a month for evaluation).