Spring Speaker 2006
The Purdue Statistics Graduate Student Organization is pleased to have Professor Bradley Efron as this year's Spring Speaker. Professor Efron is the Chairman of the Department of Statistics and the Max H. Stein Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. For his research work in computer applications in statistics, Professor Efron has been awarded the Lester R. Ford Award (1979), the MacArthur Fellowship (1983), and the Wilks Memorial Medal (1990). He has served as President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is particularly known for his work with techniques known as the bootstrap and the jackknife. Currently, he is interested in applications that include biostatistics and astrophysics.Thursday, March 9, 2006
4:30PM in MATH 175
Professor Bradley Efron
Max H. Stein Professor of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University
Joint with Research Colloquium
Correlation and Large-Scale Simultaneous Significance Testing
Abstract
Large-scale hypothesis testing problems, with hundreds or thousands of test statistics "z[i]" to consider at once, have become commonplace in current practice. Applications of popular analysis methods such as false discovery rates do not require independence of the z[i]'s but their accuracy can be compromised in high-correlation situations. This talk discusses methods, both theoretical and computational, for assessing the size and effect of correlation in large-scale testing problems. A microarray example will be used to illustrate the ideas. The example shows surprisingly large correlations that badly destabilize standard statistical analyses, but newer methods can remedy at least part of the trouble.
