Faculty and graduate students from the Iowa State University Department of Statistics participated at the 2025 International Indian Statistical Association (IISA) Conference, held June 12–15 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Attendees from the department contributed to a broad array of sessions, presented research, and competed in the conference’s Stat Bowl competition.
The IISA Conference is an international gathering of statisticians, data scientists, and applied researchers from academia, industry, and government. This year’s program featured more than 230 presentations, special invited sessions, panel discussions, and student competitions.
One highlight of the conference was the Stat Bowl, a fast-paced quiz competition that tested students on the history of statistics and fun facts about the field. Iowa State Statistics was well represented by graduate students Rohit Kanrar, Debarghya Jana, and Debarshi Chakraborty.
In addition to the Stat Bowl, Iowa State researchers had a substantial presence in the conference’s program. Presentations by faculty and graduate students covered a wide range of statistical theory and applications, including clinical trials, high-dimensional data, bioinformatics, spatial modeling, election analysis, and fMRI data interpretation. Presentations included:
- Rohit Kanrar (Student Paper Competition): Risk-inclusive Contextual Bandits for Early Phase Clinical Trials
- Ranjan Maitra and Subrata Pal: Tensor-on-Tensor Time Series Regression for Integrated One-step Analysis of fMRI Data
- Karin S. Dorman and Debosmita Kundu: A Branching Process Model for Digital Read Quantification with Application to PCR-Based Diagnostics
- Chunlin Li: Quantifying the Mediation Effect for Non-sparse High-dimensional Omics Mediators
- Somak Dutta: Matrix-free Conditional Simulation of Gaussian Random Fields
- Dan Nettleton and Shigeki Kanamori: Who Is Winning? Determining Whether a Candidate Leads in a Ranked-Choice Election
- Vivekananda Roy: Informed MCMC for Spatial GLMMs
- Debarghya Jana: Some Mixture Models for Joint Analysis of Wind Speed and Wind Direction
- Lynna Chu and Yichuan Bai: A Graph-based Approach to Estimating the Number of Clusters in High-dimensional Settings
Iowa State faculty also served as session organizers and chairs, contributing to the conference’s structure. The event provided a valuable opportunity for faculty and students to share their work, connect with peers, and engage in current conversations in statistics and data science.
Conference Photos:
