The Data Research Camp of the Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Applications of the University of Florence was held on July 15-18, 2024, on the beautiful hill rising from Florence towards Fiesole, at the Centro Studi Ricerca e Formazione (CISL) in Florence.
It was an exciting free 4-day meeting where young scholars were prompted to explore statistics and data science to extract new knowledge from data. During the camp, the young scholar participants worked in teams under the guidance of five senior researchers Bianca De Stavola, Daniele Durante, Laura Forastiere, Antonio Gasparrini and Corwin Zigler with leading experience in different areas of Statistics, including statistical methods for long-term longitudinal studies, Bayesian methods, models for complex, high–dimensional and network–related phenomena, causal inference in complex settings involving spatial and network data, methods for investigating causal pathways through intermediate variables or mechanisms, development of study designs and statistical for time series data, quasi-experimental studies, and survival analysis.
The senior researchers worked hard with the young scholars to develop innovative methods and models to analyze a common dataset, to answer scientific questions arising from a cancer genomics case study. The publicly available data of lower grade glioma from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data portal was used as motivating application study. Francesco Stingo, who previously worked on these data, was invited to introduce them on the first day of the Data Research Camp. After the presentation of the dataset and Q&A session on the data, the groups started to work! Innovative ideas, new questions and cutting-age statistical methods were proposed to analyze the data as shown by the mid and final presentations.
The DiSIA is proud to have organized this exciting event; it laid the groundwork for new interdisciplinary pathways that can lead to cutting-age contributions to the modern Statistics from both methodological and applied perspectives.
The Data Research Camp was supported by the excellence program “Rethinking Data Science (ReDS): advances in causal inference and statistical learning across domains” and it is endorsed by the PhD programs in Statistics of the University of Florence, Bocconi University, University of Bologna and University of Padova. It followed two successful editions organized by the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padua (see the websites of the 2019 and 2022 editions).
Stay tuned for the 2026 edition!
Programme
Participants
Photos
Senior Group Leaders
Antonio Gasparrini
LSHTM – London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Corwin Zigler
The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Organizing Committee
Anna Gottard – University of Florence – Florence Center for Data Science
Alessandra Mattei – University of Florence
Fabrizia Mealli (European University Institute, University of Florence).
Francesco Sera (University of Florence)
Organizing Secretariat
Marta Mascalchi – University of Florence
Scientific Committee
Antonio Canale – University of Padova
Alessandra Luati – Imperial College London and University of Bologna
Alessandra Mattei – University of Florence
Fabrizia Mealli – European University Institute
Raffaella Piccarreta – Bocconi University
Nicola Sartori – University of Padova
Francesco Sera – University of Florence