Associate Professor of Statistics Wicher Bergsma helped pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to develop a better way to analyse vaccine trials. Read more here and download a PDF of the impact case study.

Jouni Kuha, Associate Professor of Statistics and Research Methodology and Head of the Department of Methodology at LSE, explains the detail behind the exit poll forecast and indicates some of the difficulties in putting together a forecast under considerable time pressures. Please read his blog entry here.

Professor Fiona Steele is a plenary speaker at the 4th Annual Survival Analysis for Junior Researchers Conference. This takes place at Keele University on 9 and 10 April 2015.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics (JEBS) has chosen Professor Irini Moustaki as the Outstanding Reviewer for 2014. An award ceremony takes place at the Journal Publications Committee Reception in Chicago on 16 April 2015.

As part of the Methods Summer Programme (Quantitative Social Research Methods), Professor Irini Moustaki will teach the course ME115 Latent variable modelling and structural equation modelling for social sciences research on 17-21 August 2015.

As part of the Methods Summer Programme (Quantitative Social Research Methods), Dr James Abdey will teach the course ME108 Statistical methods for social research using SPSS  on 17-28 August 2015.

The Leverhulme Trust has awarded LSE with 15 doctoral scholarships, five per year for three years, worth £1 million, for students to undertake interdisciplinary research on "the challenge of escalating inequalities".

These prestigious scholarships will provide £70,000 each (to cover 36 months of study) will be affiliated with LSE's new International Inequalities Institute (opening May 2015) and directed by Professor Mike Savage, Head of the Department of Sociology.

As well as being supervised by experts in their home departments, students will also be actively mentored by a group of seven leading scholars who all have outstanding records of research on escalating inequalities.

The Scholarships will pay UK/EU fees per academic session and the remainder can be used for living costs.  More information is available here.

A study by Oxford University and LSE shows that, contrary to what is widely supposed, there has been no decline in social mobility in Britain over recent decades but more of us are moving down rather than up the social ladder. The study looked at a total of more than 20,000 British men and women in four birth cohorts from 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1980-84.

‘The mobility problem in Britain: New findings from analysis of birth cohort data’, by Associate Professor Erzsébet Bukodi, Dr John Goldthorpe and Dr Lorraine Waller of Oxford University, with Dr Jouni Kuha (LSE, departments of Methodology and Statistics), is published in the early online issue of the British Journal of Sociology on Thursday, 6 November 2014.

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Health and Development (1946), the National Child Development Study (1958), the British Cohort Study (1970) and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (1980-84).

With effect from 1 November 2014 Professor Irini Moustaki has been appointed the new Executive Editor of Psychometrika, the scientific journal of the Psychometric Society. 

Downloadable materials (Mplus, R, SPSS and STATA) are now available here for Analysis of Multivariate Social Science Data (second edition), published by Chapman and Hall / CPC Press. This book is co-authored by David J Bartholomew, Fiona Steele, Irini Moustaki and Jane I Galbraith.

This one day workshop, organised by Jouni Kuha, takes place at LSE on Monday 15 December 2014. The speakers are Rory Fitzgerald (City University), Jouni Kuha (LSE), Lars Lyberg (University of Stockholm), Irini Moustaki (LSE), Bart Meuleman (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Daniel Oberski (Tilburg University).

Please see the workshop website here.

Royal Statistical Society
29 and 30 September 2014
Presented by Irini Moustaki, Jouni Kuha and Sally Stares

Latent variable models are a broad family of models that can be used to capture abstract concepts by means of multiple (continuous and/or categorical) indicators. They are often best known in the form of factor analysis and structural equation models. Day 1 introduces participants to latent trait models (continuous latent variables) and latent class models (discrete latent variables) and Day 2 to multiple group latent trait and latent class analyses. The course provides training in the use of Mplus to carry out the analyses.

By the end of day 1, participants will be able to use Mplus and R routines to fit latent trait and latent class models to sing le groups; read the input from Mplus and produce measures of fit, compare models through model selection criteria; produce plots and interpret results.

By the end of day 2, participants will be able to use Mplus and the R routines developed to fit latent trait and latent class models to multiple groups; compare models; test for measurement equivalence; set model constraints; compare the distributions of latent variables between different groups (e.g. countries); make valid comparisons and interpret results.

Aimed at: Researchers interested in the use of cutting edge statistical methodology for analysing survey data from cross-sectional and for cross-national surveys.

Thank you to everyone who attend this conference on 8 September 2014 and helped to make it such success. Please see the conference website here for full details, including presentation slides.

ESRC future research leaders fellowship

We are delighted to announce that Dr Myrsini Katsikatsou has been awarded an ESRC future research leaders fellowship (ES/L009838/1). The research project, "Methods of analysis and inference for social survey data within the framework of latent variable modelling and pairwise likelihood", will start on 1 October 2014.

Dr Jouni Kuha and Professor Irini Moustaki have collaborated as guest associate editors to produce a special themed edition of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics), volume 63 (2), pages 191-360, February 2014. Originating in a two-day conference on social statistics at the LSE in December 2011, organised by Professor Moustaki to honour the scientific contributions of Professor Emeritus David J Bartholomew, the papers in this edition represent a wider range of styles than is usual for the journal.

Professor Irini Moustaki has been appointed honorary Doctor by Uppsala University, at the Faculty of Social Sciences. The conferment ceremony and festival banquet will take place on 24 January 2014.

Professor Moustaki's paper Pairwise likelihood estimation for factor analysis models with ordinal data, co-authored with Myrsini Katsikatsou (LSE), Fan Yang-Wallentin (Uppsala) and Karl G Jöreskog (Uppsala), is published by Computational statistics and data analysis, 56 (12), pp. 4243-4258, ISSN 0167-9473.

This year's Social Statisticsworkshop, recent advances in the analysis of categorical and count data, took place on Thursday 12 December 2013.

Ardo van den Hout (UCL)
Joint models for discrete longitudinal outcomes in ageing research

Maria Kateri (RWTH Aachen University)
Generalised odds ratio structures in ordinal response analysis
(Slides not available)

Peter W F Smith (University of Southampton)
Statistical modelling of population processes

J K (Jeroen) Vermunt (Tilburg University)
Multilevel latent Markov modelling in continuous time with an application to the analysis of ambulatory mood assessment data

Further information about the workshop can be viewed here.

Professor Chris Skinner has led an independent review of the methodology underlying the options for the future of the Census, on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

A Census has taken place in Great Britain since 1801. Options set out in a recent public consultation by the ONS could lead to a radical departure in England and Wales from the traditional approach that has obtained information on all individuals every 10 years until 2011.

In a report published on 1 November 2013 Professor Skinner and his team, which included Michael Murphy, Professor of Demography at LSE, and demographic consultant John Hollis, explain that although results of ONS research to date are promising, the case for replacement of the traditional census model by the more radical option - combining administrative data with compulsory annual surveys - had not yet been established.

They conclude that a number of methodological challenges that had been identified would need first to be addressed if this option is to be pursued.

The team’s full report can be found on the ONS website. An associated statement from the Royal Statistical Society can be found here.

The Winter 2012 edition of LSE's alumni magazine LSE Connect features an article by Professor Chris Skinner on Dealing with the data deluge. You can read the article here.