Announcing the April meeting of the WA Branch of the Statistical Society of Australia. All visitors are welcome to attend this event.

We are pleased to host our guest speaker Dr Alan Huang of The University of Queenland who will deliver his address via Zoom.

Presentation

On arbitrarily underdispersed discrete distributions

Dr Alan Huang, School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland.

We review a range of popular generalized count distributions, investigating which (if any) can be arbitrarily underdispersed, i.e., its variance can be arbitrarily small compared to its mean. A philosophical implication is that models failing this criterion perhaps should not be considered a “statistical model” according to the extendibility criterion of McCullagh (2002). Four practical implications will be discussed. We suggest that all generalizations of the Poisson distribution be tested against this property.

About the Speaker

Dr Huang has an Honours degree in Science (Advanced Mathematics) from the University of Sydney, and a PhD (Statistics) from the University of Chicago on a McCormick Fellowship. He previously lectured at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Technology Sydney, before moving to the University of Queensland where he is currently the Statistics Major Convenor.

Refreshments and Dinner

Members and visitors are invited to mingle over wine and cheese from 5:30PM onwards at the venue.

Following the meeting all are invited to dine at a nearby restaurant. Visitors are welcome.

Meeting directions

The Cheryl Praeger Lecture Room is located on the ground floor of the Mathematics building at The University of Western Australia. Its entrance is on the northern side of the building. See: UWA Maps, Google Maps.

Parking is free on the UWA Crawley campus after 5:00PM. A convenient place to park is Car Park 18 accessible from Fairway Entry 1.

COVID-19 Restrictions

Members of the public, including alumni, members of Convocation, contractors and visitors to UWA will need to provide evidence of vaccination status.

This can be provided via  ServiceWA app; the Express plus Medicare mobile app; a COVID-19 digital certificate with an acceptable form of ID or an Immunisation history statement with an acceptable form of ID.

Full details may be found at https://www.uwa.edu.au/covid-19-faq/Home/Conditional-access-to-campus-for-visitors.

Remote Viewing Option

For those that cannot attend in-person, the presentation will be streamed live over Zoom. Please register on this page to get the connection details.

For further information please contact the WA Branch Secretary (ssa.wa.secretary@gmail.com).