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NZSA 2024 — Programme

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The Conference programme is given below. Clicking on the title of a presentation will open the abstract in a new tab.

All talks are in the three lecture theatres within the Maclaurin (MC) building, and all food plus refreshments will be served in the Maclaurin building Foyer. For more details on that location, please see the Victoria University of Wellington Kelburn Campus Map (pdf).

The last speaker in each contributed session is the Session Chair – unless a session only has student presenters, in which case the chair will not be a speaker. Please make sure all contributed talks keep to time: a total of 20 minutes for each talk, including a couple of minutes for questions. We have a busy schedule and some people may wish to swap between rooms at changeover times during the sessions.

Presenters are responsible for ensuring their talk is 'ready to go' when their session starts – please set up at the latest by the end of the refreshment break before each session. PDF and PowerPoint presentations should both work with no problems, directly from a USB. Connections for personal laptops are available too, if necessary.

Please note the NZSA 2024 Timetable also has a brief outline of events on the three days.

Monday 2 December

Time	Event and Location
12.00-1:00pm	Conference Registration and Lunch: Maclaurin building, Foyer
1:00-1.15pm	Karakia, Formal Welcome and Housekeeping: MC LT103
	Karakia: Tu Temara, Mata Awhinuke, Marae o te Herenga Waka Welcome Speech: Professor Margaret Hyland, Deputy V-C (Research), Victoria University of Wellington Housekeeping: John Haywood
1.15-2.05pm	Plenary Session 1: MC LT103. Chair: John Haywood Alan Welsh: Double descent and noise in fitting linear regression models
2.05-2.10pm	Short Break (5 minutes)
Time	Session A1: MC LT101 Chair: Ivy Liu	Session A2: MC LT102 Chair: Matt Parry	Session A3: MC LT103 Chair: Ian Westbrooke
2.10-2.30pm	Student Talk Jessica Allen: Statistical modelling of slow and fast earthquakes in the Hikurangi Subduction Zone, New Zealand	Student Talk Qingyu Meng: An explainable disease risk prediction model based on deep transfer learning using high-dimensional genomic data	Timothy Bilton: Relatedness estimation in pooled samples sequenced using low-depth high-throughput methods
2.30-2.50pm	Student Talk Oxana Hart: Using spatio-temporal models to investigate stock structure, seasonality and environment influences in the snapper population from the west coast of New Zealand	Student Talk Wenqi Zhao: Extension of VGAM package	Budhi Arta Surya: Maximum likelihood recursive state estimation
2.50-3.10pm	Student Talk Alec van Helsdingen: Extending spatial capture-recapture with the Hawkes process	Student Talk Hengzhe Zhang: EvoFeat: Genetic programming-based feature engineering approach to tabular data	Ian Westbrooke: What makes for a happy tramper?
3.10-3.40pm	Afternoon Refreshments, sponsored by SAS New Zealand (30 minutes): Maclaurin building, Foyer
3.40-4.10pm	Premium Sponsor's Presentation, SAS New Zealand: MC LT103. Chair: Ivy Liu Joe Robins: The best minds of my generation are teaching machines to be convincingly wrong – how do we make this right?
Time	Session B1: MC LT101 Chair: Matt Edwards	Session B2: MC LT102 Chair: Ciprian Doru Giurcăneanu	Session B3: MC LT103 Chair: Anna Fergusson
4.10-4.30pm	Student Talk Amin Boumerdassi: Investigating the impact of gravitational wave glitches on the parameter estimation of extreme mass ratio inspirals	Student Talk Guoping Hu: Forecasting multiple time series with graph convolutional networks	Andrew Balemi: Teaching GLMS to undergraduates
4.30-4.50pm	Student Talk Tarin Eccleston: Variational autoencoders for stellar core-collapse gravitational waves	Student Talk Sajeeka Nanayakkara: Evaluating the predictive performance of regression and machine learning models for rare events: A simulation study on structural recurrence in thyroid cancer	Liza Bolton: That's questionable: Designing and deploying effective models for generating multiple versions of auto-marked questions
4.50-5.10pm	Student Talk Kang Wang: Galaxy cluster gas pressure profile modelling with reversible jump MCMC: A case study using Planck data	Student Talk Hannah Yun: Advanced methods for time series data applied to prediction of operating modes for wind turbines	John Harraway: Motivational resources for training in statistics
5.10-5.30pm	Matt Edwards: A novel stacked hybrid autoencoder for imputing data gaps in the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna	Ciprian Doru Giurcăneanu: Dissimilarity measures for time series	Anna Fergusson: Lost (and found) in translation: Examining the diversity and impact of languages selected on student responses to a statistical investigation of automated language translation

Tuesday 3 December

Time	Session C1: MC LT101 Chair: Alan Bentley	Session C2: MC LT102 Chair: Alain Vandal	Session C3: MC LT103 Chair: Xun Xiao
9.00-9.20am	Student Talk Tori Diamond: Novel applications of linked administrative data – adding longitudinal capability to the Te Kupenga survey	Student Talk Soyoon Annie Park: Investigating the effect of repeated patients in surgical outcomes research	Student Talk Mario Prado: Navigating the maze of multi-omics methods for classification including microbiome data
9.20-9.40am	Student Talk Ying Cui: Semi-supervised model-based clustering for ordinal response data	Student Talk Angeline Xiao: Evaluating the impact of timely access to concussion services on patient outcomes in Aotearoa	Student Talk Janet Stacey: State of the nation: Accessibility of vaping products in New Zealand
9.40-10.00am	Student Talk Bradley Drayton: Variance estimators for mixed effects proportional hazards models fitted to complex samples	Student Talk Siwei Zhai: Childhood risk and resilience factors for Pasifika youth respiratory health: Accounting for attrition and missingness	Student Talk WITHDRAWN Zehua Zang: Branching processes with detection: Probabilistic analysis
10.00-10.20am	WITHDRAWN Gabriele Frigerio Porta: A statistician in the public sector	Claudia Rivera-Rodriguez: Sampling small older populations: Methods and challenges of a dementia prevalence study	Robin Willink: A logical contradiction when considering an unknown constant to have a probability density function
10.20-10.40am	Alan Bentley: Introducing the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s new business expectations survey	Alain C. Vandal: Reporting randomised factorial trial results: the Topical Analgesia Post-Haemorrhoidectomy trial	Xun Xiao: Learning cascading failure pattern in massive pipe network data: a plumber's guide
Time	Event and Location
10.40-11.10am	Morning Refreshments (30 minutes): Maclaurin building, Foyer
11.10am-12.00pm	Plenary Session 2: MC LT103. Chair: Ivy Liu Kate Kolich: Data leadership within and beyond your organisation
12.00-1.00pm	Lunch (60 minutes): Maclaurin building, Foyer
1.00-2.20pm	Inaugural live-streamed ANZJS Read Paper: MC LT103. Chair: Martin Hazelton Marti Anderson: The incremental progression from fixed to random factors in the analysis of variance: a new synthesis (with discussion) The Zoom link for the webinar session is: https://vuw.zoom.us/j/96030995168
2.20-2.25pm	Short Break (5 minutes)
Time	Session D1: MC LT101 Chair: Priya Parmar	Session D2: MC LT102 Chair: Thomas Lumley	Session D3: MC LT103 Chair: Tieta Vesty
2.25-2.45pm	Student Talk Sam Preston: Understanding the lived experiences of impostor phenomenon among leaders in Mathematics and Statistics	Student Talk Khan Buchwald: Comparisons between functional brain networks for schizophrenia and healthy case controls: A Bayesian network approach	Amanda O'Connell, James Maguire, Roimata Timutimu: Methodology for Māori descent in the 2023 Census
2.45-3.05pm	Student Talk Adam Glucksman: The subjective wellbeing of first-in-family university students: A multivariate re-evaluation of common narratives	Student Talk Sarah Croft: A Bayesian close-kin mark-recapture model using pedigree reconstruction	Walter Somerville, James Maguire, Roimata Timutimu: Methodology for iwi affiliation in the 2023 Census
3.05-3.25pm	Priya Parmar: Identifying influential factors impacting trajectories of anxiety in adolescents experiencing adverse events	Thomas Lumley: Speeding up design in Bayesian platform trials	Tieta Vesty, Meenu Jose, Roimata Timutimu: Admin data quality for iwi affiliation in the 2023 Census
3.25-3.55pm	Afternoon Refreshments (30 minutes): Maclaurin building, Foyer
3.55-5.15pm	NZSA Annual General Meeting (AGM): MC LT103
6.00pm onwards	Pre-dinner drinks (at your own cost) then Conference Dinner (cost included) Harbourside Function Centre, Shed 22, 4 Taranaki St, Wellington

Wednesday 4 December

Time	Event and Location
9.00-10.40am	Plenary Sessions 3 and 4: MC LT103. Chair: Nokuthaba Sibanda Ruth Shinoda: Insights, killer stats and impact Kylie Reiri: Payment for Success: An introduction to how paying for social outcomes works, and the critical role of statisticians
10.40-11.10am	Morning Refreshments (30 minutes): Maclaurin building, Foyer
Time	Session E1: MC LT101 Chair: Charlotte Jones-Todd	Session E2: MC LT102 Chair: Lisa Chen	Session E3: MC LT103 Chair: James Curran
11.10-11.30am	Bethany Macdonald: Improving minimum contrast for clustered processes	Tom Elliott: Introducing rserve-ts: a modernised library for R-to-web communication	Len Cook: Where missing values really matter for models in public policy – real life examples
11.30-11.50am	Joane Elleouet: Predicting the size of any species' genome using the taxonomy tree	Takafumi Kubota: Interactive visualization of suicide methods in Tokyo Japan	Yongshi Deng: Vismi: Visualisation tools for multiple imputation
11.50am-12.10pm	Martin Hazelton: Model-based priors for network tomography	Simon Urbanek: Democratising interactive statistical graphics	Robin Willink: A simple adjustment makes the Wilcoxon rank-sum/Mann-Whitney test uniformly more powerful
12.10-12.30pm	Charlotte Jones-Todd: Accounting for social networks in a self-exciting point process model	Lisa Chen: Is AI eating data scientists' lunch?	James Curran: What the Zeta!
12.30-1.30pm	Lunch (60 minutes): Maclaurin building, Foyer
Time	Session F1: MC LT101 Chair: Justin Murphy	Session F2: MC LT102 Chair: Mark Weatherall	Session F3: MC LT103 Chair: Rolf Turner
1.30-1.50pm	Jamas Enright: Synthetic bridge over troubled data	Thomas Yee: Heaping and seeping, GAITD regression and doubly constrained reduced rank vector generalized linear models, in smoking studies	Alejandro C. Frery: Ordinal Patterns, features and their distribution
1.50-2.10pm	Manori Wickramasinghe: Improving probabilistic linking in the IDI	Alice Richardson: Trends in current smoking status at state-age-sex level in Australia: An application of multinomial multilevel time-series modelling	Zhijian Wen: An adaptive polynomial baseline correction method in voltammetry with application to the prediction of the concentration of cocaine aptamer
2.10-2.30pm	Justin Murphy: A tool to evaluate environmental trend estimation methods	Mark Weatherall: Validation of clinically important differences for randomised controlled trials in asthma	Rolf Turner: Pseudo analysis of variance of K-functions
2.30pm onwards	David Vere-Jones Tribute by David Harte in MC LT103 then Closing (John Haywood), followed by Afternoon Refreshments to help you on your way

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