Online CoDa-Day

Because, the next CoDa Association conference, CoDaWork 2021, has been postponed to 2022 due to the Covid pandemics, the Toulouse team has decided to organize for the first time an online only event in 2021. It will consist in five invited talks and will take place on Thursday June 17, 2021, 14h-17h  (GMT+2). 

One of the goals is to foster the interest in the study of compositional data and their applications, to offer a forum of discussion for people concerned with the statistical treatment and modeling of compositional data or other constrained data sets, and the interpretation of models or applications involving them. Compositional data are typically defined as vectors of positive components representing parts of a whole which carry relative information. Frequently, these compositional vectors have constant sum, usually 100% or 1. These conditions render most classical statistical techniques incoherent on compositions, as they were devised for random variables with the real space as sample space. Aitchison introduced the log-ratio approach to analyze compositional data back in the eighties. His solution was based on transforming the data vector with some log-ratio transformations and applying classical techniques to the scores so obtained. This became the foundation of modern compositional data analysis, nowadays based on an appropriate geometric structure for the simplex and an appropriate representation of the sample space of compositional vectors. 

Examples of application abound in different fields of sciences: chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, life sciences and medicine with genome and microbiome research, economy, social statistics and social sciences. The following themes have been selected for the five invited talks of 2021 online CoDa-Day: geosciences, social sciences, microbiome, time-use, and theory.

Invited speakers:

Alessandra Menafoglio is a Senior Assistant Professor in Statistics at the Department of Mathematics of the Politecnico di Milano, within the laboratory for modeling and scientific computing (MOX). She obtained her PhD in Mathematical Models and Methods in Engineering in 2015 at Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests focus on the study of innovative statistical models and methods for the analysis of complex and large data (such as curves and images), with particular emphasis on spatially distributed complex data and functional compositional data. In the last years, she focused on the problems of modeling, prediction (kriging) and stochastic simulation for very general types of data, in the context of Object Oriented Spatial Statistics, with application to Earth and Environmental Sciences. Further scientific interests regards the field of statistical process control in modern industrial production (e.g., in additive manufacturing), when the response to be monitored is a complex shape, or a high-dimensional object. Her doctoral thesis was awarded in 2016 with the "Eni Award, Debut in Research Prize". Recently, she was awarded the 2019 Andrei Borisovich Vistelius Research Award by the IAMG. She is Associate Editor of the journals Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment and Applied Computing and Geosciences, and she is part of the Editorial Board of the journal Mathematical Geosciences. 

Berta Ferrer Rosell holds an international PhD in Tourism (Excellent Cum Laude and Extraordinary Award), a MSc in Tourism Management and Planning and a BA in Tourism. She is currently senior lecturer (Serra Húnter Fellow) at the University of Lleida (Catalonia – Spain) and her current research interests cover the analysis of compositional data on electronic tourism and electronic marketing. She defines herself as CoDa user, feeling greatly comfortable applying the method and thus approaching it to applied tourism (and other social sciences) researches. She was the first worldwide researcher in using CoDa in the field of tourism, to analyse tourist’s trip budget composition. Afterwards she moved into the marketing area and e-tourism. In these areas, she has been invited to talk about CoDa in Tourism in several conferences (e.g., COMPSTAT 2018), as well as teaching the session “Introduction to Compositional Data Analysis & Applications to e-tourism” at the European IFITT Masterclass on e-tourism, and co-authored chapters in books related to e-tourism methods and research methods for marketing management with contributions using CoDa. Coordinator of the Joint Degree in Tourism and Business Management at the University of Lleida, Associate Editor of the European Journal of Tourism Research, board member of the Spanish Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism (AECIT) and chair of the PhDWorkshop at conference ENTER21 (IFITT). Her CoDa research has been published in Q1JCR journals such as Tourism Management, Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, International Journal of Hospitality Management and Annals of Tourism Research.

Jennifer McKinley is Director of the Centre for GIS and Geomatics and Director of the Environmental Change and Resilience Research Cluster, QUB. Her research focuses on the application of spatial analysis techniques, including geostatistics, compositional data analysis and Geographical Information Science (GIS), to soil geochemistry, environmental and criminal forensics, human health, geohazards and weathering studies.  

Jennifer holds a number of international roles including Councillor of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) , Past President of the International Association of Mathematical Geoscientists (IAMG), member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA)  Geosciences and Geographical Sciences committee and Communications Officer for the Initiative on Forensic Geology (IFG). Throughout her career Jennifer has taken an active role in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion in academia and has contributed to this globally. Interdisciplinary collaboration and strong partnership working underpins her commitment to high impact global research.

Luz Calle Rosingana is Full Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics and Head of the Biosciences Department, University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia. With a background in Mathematics (BSc Mathematics, Universitat de Barcelona, 1986 and PhD in Mathematics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 1997), she teaches biostatistics, bioinformatics and genetic epidemiology in the Biotechnology degree and is the chair of the Master of Sciences in Omics Data Analysis, where she teaches the course “Statistical and data-mining methods for omics data analysis”.

She is the group leader of the Bionformatics and Medical Statistics Group of the University of Vic (consolidated group 2014SGR-596). 

Her main research areas are statistical genetics, omics data analysis, microbiome data analysis and survival analysis. She works on the development of new methods for biomarker discovery, identification of genetic risk profiles and construction of dynamic prediction and prognostic models of disease evolution. She is also interested in statistical methods for integration of multi-omics data and compositional data approaches in metagenomics. 

She is member of several scientific societies: BiostatNet-Spanish National Network in Biostatistics, Catalan Statistical Society, Spanish Society of Statistics and Operational Research, International Biometric Society, International Genetic Epidemiology Society. 

Former President of the Spanish Region of the International Biometrics Society (2012-2013) and Vicepresident (2014).

Željko Pedišić Associate Professor. He leads the Active Living & Public Health research group at the Institute for Health and Sport, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. His research is centred around chronic disease prevention and promotion of well-being through healthy use of time. He is one of the authors of the framework for Viable Integrative Research in Time-Use Epidemiology (VIRTUE). He is Secretary of the International Network of Time-Use Epidemiologists (INTUE) and honorary Docent of Quantitative Methods at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. His publication record includes >80 journal articles. As a methodological consultant or supervisor he contributed to four bachelor, 25 master’s and 17 PhD research theses. In his free time, he enjoys spending time with family and friends, playing piano, composing music, playing sports, cycling, skiing, and eating pizza.

More information: CoDa Association website