The ISI was established in 1885 and is one of the oldest international scientific associations in the world. The ISI is especially renowned for its biennial sessions. The 57th Session of the ISI is the first biennial session to be staged in sub-Saharan Africa. By participating in this platform, the University of Pretoria speakers will be presented with the opportunity to expand on current statistical methods and their application. This will be undertaken through the promotion of international activities and co-operation.

The focus group with project title: “Beyond known continuous distributions “ with research in distribution theory focussing on:
• distributions with bounded and unbounded domain;
• the distributions of operations on independent/dependent random variables/matrix variables ;
• normal and non-normal distributions;
• methods to derive new distributions;
• properties of new distributions using theory supported by mathematical software;
• inference (classical and Bayesian) and
• applications

This will be well presented by Andriëtte Bekker, René Ehlers, Liesbeth Bodvin and other collaborators. Ehlers will present some results from her PhD. The title of her talk is: ‘Bimatrix variate Beta type IV distribution and its relation to the Wilks’s statistic’. The title of Liesbeth Bodvin’s presentation is: ‘Bayesian Estimation of Shannon Entropy for prior bivariate beta distributions’.

In staying abreast with these world standards, Andriëtte Bekker will deliver a paper at the 27th European Meeting of Statisticians in Toulouse, France from 20 – 24 July 2009. EMS 2009 will be a noteworthy major European international meeting of 2009 covering mathematical statistics, statistical applications and applied probability. The title of Bekker’s paper is: ‘Exact distribution of the nonnull Wilks’s statistic: ratio and product of independent components’. This work is based upon research supported by the National Research Foundation, South Africa and the Research Development Programme (University of Pretoria).

Crafford will present a talk titled ‘Analysing income distributions in the case of grouped data: The South African Census 2001’. The 10% data set of The South African Census 2001 is used to illustrate how to model a grouped response variable with an underlying continuous distribution. The influence of explanatory variables such as GENDER, AGE, EDUCATION LEVEL and POPULATION GROUP on the grouped response variable INCOME is considered.

Strydom will also present a talk. It is titled ‘A New Methodology for Mixed Models and Models for Longitudinal Data’. A procedure which provides a convenient methodology for modeling complex variance structures is presented. Examples are used to illustrate the flexibility of the procedure.

Speaking of statistical distributions, Paul J. van Staden is organising a Special Topic Contributed Paper Meeting (STCPM) at ISI 2009. The focus of this STCPM, titled Fitting Families of Generalized Statistical Distributions, will be on the fitting of distributional families to data. To this end, papers on distribution theory as well as papers on estimation methodologies and on the application of generalized distributions to data will be presented by invited participants from South Africa, Australia, Turkey and the United States of America. Participants from the Department of Statistics include Theodor Loots (‘Method of L-moment estimation for a statistical universe based upon the quantile function’) and Van Staden (‘Parameter estimation for the generalized lambda distribution based upon her shape properties’), while Prof. Andrzej Kijko and Ansie Smit from the Aon Benfield Natural Hazard Centre at the University of Pretoria will present a paper entitled ‘Assessing the upper limit of a distribution’. Prof. Bekker will chair the session.

Human, Graham and Kritzinger will also be participants in a STCPM titled Advances in Statistical Process Control (SPC) Research. In this regard, the members from the department took the lead and also invited speakers from the University of Botswana and the University of the Free State to join in. Prof Crowther (HOD of the Department of Statistics from the University of Pretoria) will be the chair of this session.

SPC is an acknowledged research area within the Department of Statistics at the University of Pretoria and the SPC research group has been very active during the past few years. The aims of the STCPM include sharing some of our recently acquired knowledge with participants and gain further insight into unanswered research questions.

Human will present results related to work from his PhD while Graham will present some results on an article that has recently been submitted to the Journal of Applied Statistics and Kritzinger will present some results from his Masters dissertation.

Basson, with a collaborator from WITS, are the local organisers of the IASE (International Association for Statistical Education) satellite to ISI conference: 13th – 16th August 2009. The theme ‘Next Steps in Statistics Education’ covers:

• What constitutes best practice for the curriculum beyond the “Introductory Statistics” course? What courses should follow on for those wishing to major in Statistics and what additional training should we offer to those in other disciplines?
• What elements of our undergraduate curriculum specifically prepare our students for their careers post-graduation, either in the workplace or as masters/doctoral students? How can we improve these elements?
• Now that more countries have school curricula that include substantial emphasis on data and chance, how can we better prepare teachers for implementing those curricula? What curricular materials and tools can we develop to improve students' learning of statistics at school level?

Basson will also be delivering a paper and running group discussions on Statistics Education In South Africa.

The web address is http://www.sastat.org.za/iase/.

Corbett will be attending the IASE Satellite Conference. Her talk is on "The Impact of Assessment Practices on Students' Approach to Learning in Statistics".


Proposed visual artifacts:

From left to right: Pierre Kritzinger, Schalk Human, Prof. Chris Smit, Marien Graham, Prof. Subha Chakraborti. Prof Smit and Prof Chakraborti (University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa) are the SPC group’s mentors and supervisors.