Valutazione e università, i sociologi tedeschi boicottano i ranking accademici

Una collega del Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, Francesca Coin ha scritto sul suo blog un post interessante, puoi leggerlo qui.

Usa: laureati pagati solo 10 dollari l’ora? Class action contro le università

Negli Stati Uniti gli avvocati Strauss e Anziska portano avanti la denuncia collettiva degli studenti di una ventina di facoltà, ritenute colpevoli di avere “violato le leggi a tutela dei consumatori diffondendo dati falsi circa le percentuali di laureati che trovano lavoro dopo i loro diplomi”

Leggi l'articolo intero qui.

Announce of Seminar

Prof. Ruben Zamar

Department of Statistics University of British Columbia

Ensembling Classification Models Based on Phalanxes of Variables with Applications in Drug Discovery

21 March 2013 at 10.30am

Aula ex Consiglio di Statistica Palazzo Ala C2 San Giobbe, Venezia

Anyone interested is invited to participate

Statistical detection of rare cases in highly unbalanced two class situations is an interesting and challenging problem. We are interested in detecting rare chemical compounds that are active against a biological target, such as lung cancer tumor cells, as part of a drug discovery process. Instead of predicting the classes of the compounds, we rank all of the compounds in terms of their probability of activity to produce a shortlist containing the maximum number of actives. We have used four assay datasets and five rich - in terms of number of variables – descriptor sets for each of the four assays. Capitalizing on the richness of variables in a descriptor set, we form the phalanxes by grouping variables together. The variables in a phalanx are good to put together, whereas the variables in different phalanxes are good to ensemble. We then form our ensemble by growing a random forest in each phalanx and aggregating them over the phalanxes. The performance of the ensemble of phalanxes is found to be better than its competitors random forest and regularized random forest. Our ensemble performs very well when there are many variables in a descriptor set and when the proportion of active compounds is very small. In other words, the harder the problem is the better the ensemble of phalanxes performs relative to alternative procedures.

Call for a Research Fellowship Position at DAIS

SUBJECT

Nuovi sviluppi per l’analisi di serie temporali di dati ecologici e ambientali Advances in time series analysis for ecological and environmental data

• 05/C Ecology Scientific Disciplinary Sector BIO/7 Ecology
• 03/A Analytical, Chemical and physical - Scientific Disciplinary Sector CHIM/12 Chemistry of the environment and cultural heritage
• 13/D Statistical and mathematical methods for decisions Scientific Disciplinary Sector SECS-S/01 statistics

Full documentation (Italian and English) is available here and here

Workshop on

LIKELIHOOD, APPROXIMATE LIKELIHOOD, AND NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICAL METHODS FOR COMPLEX APPLICATIONS

8-9 October 2012

Ca’ Foscari - Aula Baratto Dorsoduro 3246 – Venezia

Final meeting of the PRIN 2008 research projects:

Likelihood and nonparametric statistical techniques with some applications

Local partners: University of Roma "La Sapienza", University of Cagliari

Approximate Likelihood Methods for High-Dimensional Dependencies

Local partners: University of Udine, University of Padua, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, University of Verona

For further information: prin08.uniud.it/index.php/conferences-workshops.html

Download the Poster Δ

Phd Stundetship 2012

A call for 8 PhD studentship positions in Statistics at the University of Padova (Italy) is now open. Deadline is on October 8th, 2012. Further information are available at www.stat.unipd.it/phd/admission or contact phd@stat.unipd.it.

A brochure is available here Δ.

There is a new place for my Calendars.

Calendars

• Office hours short link: tinyurl.com/9xzuf2v
• Classes short link: tinyurl.com/9njmvej
• Exams short link: tinyurl.com/9r8j55x

Announce of Seminar

Prof. Peter Filzmoser

Department of Statistics and Probability Theory Vienna University of Technology

Compositional data analysis: Challenges for environmental sciences

13 June, 2012 at 15.30 Aula E, Santa Marta, Venezia

Anyone interested is invited to participate

Many practical data sets in environmental sciences are in fact compositional data because only the ratios between the variables are informative. Compositional data are represented in the Aitchison geometry on the simplex, and for applying statistical methods designed for the Euclidean geometry they need to be transformed first. The isometric logratio transformation has the best geometrical properties, and it avoids the singularity problem introduced by the centered logratio transformation. Since real environmental data also often contain outlying observations, robust statistical procedures need to be employed. We show for different multivariate methods how robustness can be managed for compositional data, provide algorithms for the computation, and apply the methods on real data sets from geochemistry.

The announcement is available here Δ.

Il MIUR ha aperto una consultazione pubblica sul valore legale del titolo di studio a questo indirizzo www.istruzione.it/web/ministero/consultazione-pubblica. Fai sentire anche tu la tua opinione. Passa parola!