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The Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts promotes discussions of

  • Programming concepts, theories, and techniques that are used for statistical analysis
  • Activities and pre-analysis tasks (e.g., data management) that affect statistical programming
  • Career paths and opportunities

Announcements

SSPA events at JSM 2024:

SSPA Executive Officers meeting (closed)

    Sunday, Aug 4: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

    Location: Hyatt Regency Portland, H-Willamette 4

    Invited Panel Session

    • Monday, Aug 5: 8:30 AM - 10:20 AM

    Location: Oregon Convention Center, CC-D136

    Integration of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and Real-World Evidence (RWE) Data

    Chair: Margaret Gamalo, PhD, FASA, VP- Pfizer Inc., PA, USA
    Panelists:

    Prof. Lehana Thabane, PhD, FASA, McMaster University, CANADA
    Jianchang Lin, Ph.D., Senior Director, Statistics, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Boston, MA, USA
    Ilya Lipkovich, PhD, FASA, Executive Director, Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN, USA
    Theodore (Ted) Lystig, PhD, FASA, SVP, Chief Analytics Officer, Bridge Bio Therapeutics, CA, USA

    Organizer:  Vipin Arora, Eli Lilly and Company

    Contributed Papers

    • Monday, Aug 5: 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM

    Location: Oregon Convention Center, CC-G131

    Chair: JQuan Zhou, BeiGene

    Macro for Nonnormal data, Meta Analysis and Combining SAS and R for clinical trials, mixed effect models and clinical trial experience of screening patients with Dementia

    Presentations

      1. An effective macro to analyze non-normal data with missing values - Fengzheng Zhu
      2. Risk-assessment of R packages in a Biopharmaceutical Regulatory Setting - Juliane Manitz
      3. Combining R and SAS with tidy functional programming for clinical trial design - James Otto, ALCON Laboratories Inc
      4. Increasing Dimension Asymptotics for Two-Way Crossed Mixed Effect Model - Ziyang Lyu, University of New South Wales
      5. Longitudinal Meta-Analysis Estimates when Mean from Median Estimation is Necessary - Harlan Sayles, University of Nebraska Medical Center
      6. Multimodal deep learning algorithm as a tool for Dementia clinical trial patient disease screening - William Jin, West Windsor - Plainboro High School North

    Topic-Contributed Paper Session 

    • Wednesday, Aug 7: 8:30 AM - 10:20 AM

    Location: Oregon Convention Center, CC-E144

    Advances in the Use of Open-Source Tools in the Planning, Analysis, and Reporting of Clinical Trials

    Chair: Maria Kudela

    Presentations

      1. Considerations in Leveraging Open-Source Tools in the Analysis and Reporting of Clinical Trials Data – Meta-Analysis Tools - Melvin Munsaka, AbbVie
      2. Design Software for Pivotal Trials - Keaven Anderson, Merck & Co., Inc.
      3. Re-imagining Safety Review and Submissions Using Interactive versus Static Outputs - Neetu Sangari, Pfizer
      4. Revolutionize Clinical Trial Data Exploration with {teal} - Vincent Shen

    Contributed Poster Presentations

    • Wednesday, Aug 7: 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM

    Location: Oregon Convention Center, CC-Hall CD

    Chair: Ryan Peterson, University of Colorado - Anschutz Medical Campus
    Presentation

    37 Effortless Access to Household Pulse Survey Datasets with {hpsr}: An R Data Package - Prasad Bhoite

    SSPA Mixer

      Tuesday, Aug 6: 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

      Location: Oregon Convention Center, CC-C126 

      Invited Panel Session

      • Wednesday, Aug 7: 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM

      Room: Oregon Convention Center, CC-F150

      Role of a Statistician in Drug Development in AI World

      Chair: Vipin Arora, Eli Lilly and Company
      Panelists:

      Brian Traceym Director, Statistics, Takeda, Boston, MA. 
      Paul Schuette, Scientific Computing Coordinator for the Office of Biostatistics – CDER, FDA, Silver Springs, Maryland.
      Chris Miller, Vice President - Biometrics, Astra Zeneca, Gaithersburg - Maryland.
      Kent Koprowicz, Vice President, DMC - Cytel.
      Xiaochun Li, Professor, Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, School of Medicine, Fairbanks School of Public Health, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN.
      Organizer: Vipin Arora, Eli Lilly and Company

      Other Information:

      The ASA’s Section on Statistical Programmers and Analysts (SSPA) invites students to apply for:
      Grants:
      SSPA Conference Grant Program for Students and Recent Graduates: A grant program to pay the primary registration fees for section members who have recently graduated and want to attend an ASA conference. 

      Details and requirements for both applications can be found here.

      2024 AISPAA Awardees

      We are delighted to announce the recipients of the 2024 Award for Innovation in Statistical Programming and Analytics (AISPAA). This award recognizes individuals and teams who have made significant contributions to the development and enhancement of tools, software, and methodologies that address problems in statistical programming and analytics. It also honors those who have made large contributions to the community of statistical programmers and analysts.

      This year, we proudly present the award to two outstanding recipients:

      Dr. Byron C. Jaeger
      Department of Biostatistics and Data Science, Wake Forest University School of Medicine

      Dr. JaegerDr. Jaeger is honored for his pioneering work in developing methods for oblique random forests, which he has effectively disseminated through his R package, aorsf. This package is the first to support oblique random forests for classification, regression, and survival analysis. It also introduces novel methods for variable importance and selection. Dr. Jaeger's 'accelerated' models enable aorsf to perform as quickly as other popular R packages such as ranger and randomForestSRC. He has optimized the code in aorsf for efficient computation of partial dependence and individual conditional expectation curves. Since its release, aorsf has been downloaded 14,000 times from CRAN and has received 5 citations for its companion paper since 2023.

      Dr. Cynthia Rudin, Yingfan Wang, and Haiyang Huang

      Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics, and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics - Duke UniversityDrs. Cynthia Rudin, Yingfan Wang, and Haiyang Huang

      Dr. Rudin and her team are recognized for their development of PaCMAP (Pairwise Controlled Manifold Approximation), a dimensionality reduction method designed for visualization that preserves both local and global structures of data in its original space. PaCMAP features a simpler loss function than previous approaches, making it more accessible and easier to troubleshoot. It is robust to hyperparameter selection and initial conditions due to its loss terms that maintain global structure and stable cluster locations. The method's versatility is evident as it is available in both Python and R, with fewer dependencies than most other dimensionality reduction methods. PaCMAP also offers interoperability by sharing an API with existing machine learning pipelines like scikit-learn. Its efficiency is demonstrated by its faster performance, scaling to large datasets through the use of "mid-near pairs." PaCMAP has gained significant recognition, boasting over 460 GitHub stars and an active user base. It has been applied in various fields, including the analysis of Parkinson's disease, name-ethnicity classification, and natural language embeddings.

      We congratulate Dr. Jaeger and Dr. Rudin's team on their remarkable achievements and their invaluable contributions to the field of statistical programming and analytics. Their innovative work exemplifies the spirit of the AISPAA, and we are excited to see the continued impact of their contributions on the community.

      Please join us in celebrating the accomplishments of this year’s AISPAA recipients!

      2023 Activities

      The SSPA officers meet the first Friday of each month at 11:00 am Central. 

      1. A Charter amendment has been proposed to handle the situation when an elected Executive Committee member
        of SSPA (referred as an officer) is not able to continue in their role.
        • The amendment is currently under review by officers until the end of June 11.
        • Following the officers’ review, it will be sent to SSPA members for review, which will last for two weeks.
      2. Dhuly Chowdhury is appointed as SSPA nominated officer.
      3. JSM-related: The list of SSPA-sponsored or co-sponsored sessions (invited, contributed, and poster) included in the JSM program is available. 

        Testimonials

        • SSPA provides a venue for us statistical programmers to discuss interests, share experiences, knowledge and challenges, and support each other across organizations, career stages and geographic locations.
        • Joining SSPA is an investment in my career and provides a solid platform to me for interacting effectively with peers.
        • SSPA increases awareness of our roles in the entire statistical and analytics community.

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