POWRE: Statistcs: Research, Education and Application

这项工作由妇女在研究和教育中的职业机会(POWRE)方案作为研究/教育增强项目提供资金。研究人员提出了一项研究和教育计划：利用统计学跨学科应用的丰富资源；促进模型选择和重采样方法的进步；并利用开发计算环境和课件的新能力。统计应用程序正在更多地使用灵活的、计算密集的建模程序。因此，选择合适的模型是一个重要的问题。研究人员计划将模型选择的方法扩展到稳健回归，包括最小绝对偏差回归。当数据来自重尾分布并且存在异常值时，这些最小二乘回归的替代方案非常流行。在教育领域，研究人员计划通过深入的案例研究或实验室，以本科课程中不常见的方式将统计理论与实践相结合。这些实验室提出了一些有趣的科学问题，突出了统计学发展的跨学科框架；它们采用了新的统计方法，如重抽样方法和模型选择技术；它们将在交互式方案编制环境中提出。这位研究人员还计划将她在高维建模方面的技术运用到统计学应用领域--植物研究中的根生长建模。生物学家感兴趣的是了解各种环境条件对生长中的植物组织生物合成速率的影响。使用创新的非参数方法开发增长速度和元素增长率的模型将非常有助于分析实验结果。

This work is funded through the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education (POWRE) program as a Research/Educational Enhancement Project. The investigator proposes a research and education plan that: draws on the wealth of interdisciplinary applications of statistics; contributes to advances in model selection and resampling methodologies; and utilizes the new capabilities for developing computing environments and courseware. Statistical applications are making greater use of flexible, computationally--intensive modeling procedures. As a result, the issue of selecting appropriate models is an important one. The investigator plans to extend methods of model selection to robust regression, including least absolute deviation regression. These alternatives to least squares regression are very popular when the data come from heavy tailed distributions and when there are outliers. In the area of education, the investigator plans to integrate statistical theory and practice in a way not commonly encountered in undergraduate courses -- through in-depth case studies or labs. The labs raise interesting scientific questions that highlight the interdisciplinary framework in which statistics has developed; they employ new statistical methodologies, such as resampling methods and model selection techniques; and they are to be presented in an interactive programming environment. The investigator also plans to bring her technical skills in high--dimensional modeling to bear on an area of statistical application -- modeling growth of roots in the study of plants. Biologists are interested in learning about the effects of various environmental conditions on biosynthesis rates in growing plant tissues. Developing a model for the velocity of growth and for the elemental growth rate using innovative nonparametric methodology would be very helpful in analyzing experimental outcomes.