Applied Statistics Outside the Mainstream

• Activity Number: 9
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 11, 2002 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: ASA, New York Chapter
• Author(s): Bengt Muthen*+ and Kathleen Mullen*+ and Simon Jackman*+ and Jay Magidson*+
• Affiliation(s): University of California, Los Angeles and University of Chicago and Stanford University and Statistical Innovations, Inc.

Abstract

Although the need for interdisciplinary research is constantly growing, statisticians are not always aware of the latest research in applied areas that has possibilities for more general applications. This session will feature applied researchers from a number of social science areas in which publications are statistical in nature, but are generally not in ASA journals and would therefore be less well-known (if known at all) to many mainstream statisticians. These applied areas include psychometrics, econometrics, political science, geography, history, business, and sociology. For example, issues of bioequivalence of drugs are being investigated, but researchers in that area apparently are not acquainted with similar issues in test equating (psychometrics) that have been worked on for several decades. This session will present overviews by well-known applied statistics researchers whose primary publications are not in ASA journals. They will give overviews of the types of problems that researchers in their area face, and the statistical methods they have developed to deal with those problems. The goals are to: (i) bring together researchers who may be interested in similar problems: and (ii) decrease duplication of effort by increasing awareness of related work by others.