Speaker: Liam Hemingway, Graduate Assistant, Department of Statistics, Iowa State University

Title: Effect of a Cats Age on Adoption Time in Austin Animal Shelter

Abstract: The Austin Animal Center is an animal shelter in east Austin, Texas, and is the largest no-kill animal shelter in the United States, providing safety to thousands of animals. Though animal shelters are often involved in many aspects of animal wellbeing in the community, their main mission is to find forever homes for the previously compromised animals in their care through adoption. Here we focus on cat adoption, and how the age of the cat may lengthen or shorten the time they are in the shelter before the adoption event takes place. The shelter may find this information valuable because they will understand where and when to allocate their resources, so as many cats as possible can be adopted, with as few resources as possible. This will be accomplished using a Bayesian survival/ right censored model, after accounting for other variables which describe an individual cat.