International: Workshop on Computational Methods for Robust Statistics

This Americas Program award will fund an international workshop on robust statistical methods to be held at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Statistics of the University of British Columbia in conjunction with the 2002 International Conference on Robust Statistics (ICORS2002). The workshop, which is being organized on the US side by Dr. Arnold J. Stromberg of the University of Kentucky and on the Canadian side by Dr. Ruben Zamar of the University of British Colombia, will bring together researchers and students in computational robust statistics. The Division of Mathematical Sciences is joining in the support of this workshop. Robust statistics deals with the problem that many classical statistical procedures work well only for data that comes from a population that is normally distributed. Robust statistical procedures, on the other hand, work well independently of the normality of the data or even when the data contains outliers. The last 25 years have seen tremendous advancements in the theory of robust statistics, but many very useful procedures are not used in practice due to the fact that they are difficult to compute. Improved computational methods for robust procedures would be beneficial in that current computational methods are only practical for small to moderate sized data sets. Outliers are much more likely to appear in larger data sets and thus improvement in computational methods will allow robust techniques to be applied to much larger data sets. The workshop will serve as a forum to develop and share knowledge on improved computational techniques that will allow more robust methods to be used in practice. A web page on the ICORS2002 will be devoted to discussions related to the workshop and drafts of papers will be posted there. An electronic mailing list will be used to notify participants of important developments.