BiostatsLleida

08/10/2016

En la XIV edició del concurs STUDENT, en Carles Pérez Guallar i en Nicolàs Fernàndez, han estat els guanyadors dels premis BIO i SEA, a partir del treball que han realitzat a la Unitat. L'acte d'entrega va tenir lloc a l'Institut de Salut Global de Barcelona, en el marc del dia de l'Estadística a Catalunya. Moltes felicitats!

Carles Pérez Guallar and Nicolàs Fernàndez have been the winners of the XIVth edition of the STUDENT contest (BIO and SEA awards), having presented a part of their work in the Unit. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health has been the place where they have received their awards, in the context of the Catalonia's Statistics Day. Congratulations!

16/06/2016

L'Epidemiologia està de dol pel traspàs del nostre amic i company, en Xavier Castellsagué. Compartim les encertades paraules d'en Xavier Bosch d'ahir a la Vanguardia, que fem nostres.
The epidemiology is in mourning for the death of our friend and colleague, Xavier Castellsagué. We share the wise words of Xavier Bosch yesterday at the Vanguardia journal.

12/05/2016

L'any 2015 va ser un any productiu per a la Unitat de Bioestadística i Epidemiologia (UBE) de l’IRBLleida. En resum, es van publicar 16 articles de recerca, es van realitzar 3 convenis de cooperació educativa, es va participar diferents projectes de recerca competitius, es van realitzar 9 seminaris d’estadística (Statistics is cool!), es van realitzar 3 comunicacions oral i un pòster en conferències científiques, es van realitzar dos retreats, un d’ells per a participar en una competició internacional de Data Science i l’altre per a treballar
en dos projectes concrets. A més, els membres de la Unitat van participar com a docents en la Universitat i altres entorns acadèmics. L’any 2015, l’equip de la UBE va estar format per Joan Valls (Director), Montserrat Martínez-Alonso (Estadística sènior), Gerard Castellà (Estadístic júnior), Carles Pérez-Guallar (Estudiant en pràctiques) i Ramon Boix (Estudiant en pràctiques). Sense dubte, l'any 2015 ha estat un any on tots els membres de la Unitat hem treballat en un ambient de cooperació i de aprenentatge continu en un projecte engrescador i motivador, on hem fet nostre el lema "fem que les dades parlin"!
El link següent conté el document amb la memòria complerta:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B70CEq-qZ3iXQTdMaGlBdzdRTGs

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This year 2015 was a really productive one for IRBLleida's Bioestatistics and Epidemiology Unit. 16 research articles published, 3 educational cooperation agreement undergone, participation on different competitive research projects, realization of 9 statistical seminars (called Statistics is cool!), active participation in scientific conferences and two retreats are for us a good report. Furthermore, the members of the unit participated as instructors at the University but also other academical contexts. The year 2015 the team of the UBE was formed by Joan Valls (Director), Montserrat Martínez (Senior statistic), Gerard Castellà (Junior statistician), Carles Pérez (Intern student) and Ramon Boix (Intern student). Undoubtedly, 2015 has been a year where all the members have work in a cooperative and continuous learning manner, with one main goal: let de data speak!

The following link contains the complete document with the 2015 memory of the unit (in Catalan)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B70CEq-qZ3iXQTdMaGlBdzdRTGs

21/03/2016

El passat divendres 11/03, en Gerard Castellà, de la Unitat de Bioestadística i Epidemiologia, va presentar al Friday seminars de l'IRBLleida, el seminari amb el títol "Predicting the remaining time to achieve the required number of needed patients or events in an ongoing clinical trial". Aquest treball es troba dins de la línia recerca pròpia que es duu a terme a la Unitat.

A més a més, en la presentació del seminari es va aprofitar per acomiadar en Gerard, qui després de gairebé de dos anys a la Unitat, continuarà la seva carrera en el sector privat, en l'àmbit del Big Data. Des d'aquí desitgem al Gerard molta sort!

Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3E2kYavzFsyR1NzSFJ1OUthb2M

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On Friday 11/03, Gerard Castellà, from the Biostatistics and Epidemiology Unit, presented in IRBLleida Friday Seminars, the talk entitled "Predicting the remaining time to achieve the required number of needed patients or events in an ongoing clinical trial". This work is part of the own statistical research developed in the Unit.

Moreover, during the presentation all the best wishes were given to Gerard who is leaving the Unit after almost two years. He will continue his career in the private sector, working in the Big Data field. Good luck Gerard!

Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3E2kYavzFsyR1NzSFJ1OUthb2M

12/02/2016

El dimecres dia 3 de Febrer, va tenir lloc la presa de possessió càrrec de la nova directora científica de l’IRBLleida, la doctora Elvira Fernández, en substitució del Dr Xavier Matías-Guiu, qui ha estat davant de la institució des de la seva creació, ara fa més de 10 anys. L’acte, que va reunir càrrecs de diverses institucions sanitàries i de l’acadèmia, va comptar amb la presència del Dr. Jesús Fernández Crespo, director general de l’Institut de Salut Carlos III, qui va exposar la visió estratègica d’aquest, que es pot resumir en tres pilars fonamentals: (1) una recerca translacional orientada al pacient i a millorar el diagnòstic, tractament i prevenció de les malalties; (2) una potenciació en la generació de nous procediments –patents, fàrmacs i protocols sanitaris- que permetin donar solució a problemes actuals de la medicina i (3) una ambició de continuar competint a nivell internacional, essent Espanya la 9ena potència mundial en recerca biomèdica, en termes de producció científica.
La Dra. Elvira Fernández va descriure les línies estratègiques de l’Institut, que permetin donar continuïtat a la feina ja realitzada, mantenint el reconeixement de l’IRBLleida com a centre d’excel·lència de l’Institut Carlos III, una renovació de les infraestructures i la finalització de les obres en el segon mòdul en l’edifici de recerca, així com potenciar la recerca clínica, bàsica i translacional.
L’acte va finalitzar amb un homenatge i reconeixement a la tasca duta a terme pel Dr Xavier Matias-Guiu - fac totum de l’IRBLleida- i Director Científic durant més de 10 anys, qui continuarà vinculat estretament a la institució i col·laborant en aquest gran projecte fet realitat que és ja actualment el IRBLleida.
Més informació pot ser consultada a:
http://www.lavanguardia.com/local/lleida/20160203/301873202564/elvira-fernandez-irblleida.html
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On Wednesday February 3, a ceremony took place to welcome and present to the society the new Scientific Director of the IRBLleida, Dr Elvira Fernández, in replacement of Xavier Matías-Guiu who has been in charge of this institution since its very beginning, more than ten years ago. The event, that brought together persons of different health institutions, politicians and local authorities, researchers, etc… counted with the presence of Dr. Jesús Fernández Crespo, Director of the National Health Institute Carlos III, who presented to the audience the strategy of the institute, underlying three main issues: (1) a patient-oriented clinical translational research to improve disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention (2) an increase in the production of new clinical procedures – patents, drugs and health protocols- to address current issues and needs in medicine and (3) an attitude to be competitive at the international level, being currently Spain the 9th world power in biomedical research in terms of scientific production.

Dr Elvira Fernández presented her strategical lines for the institute, continuing the work already done, potentiating the institute as an excel·lence research center of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, a renovation on the infrastructures, the completion of the second module of the research building and supporting and boosting the clinical, basic and translational research.
The act was closed with a special tribute and acknowledgement to Dr Xavier Matias-Guiu, fac totum of the IRBLleida, and Scientific Director for more than 10 years, who will remain close to the institute and will continue to contribute in this exciting project, that IRBLleida is and has become.
Further information can be found in :
http://www.lavanguardia.com/local/lleida/20160203/301873202564/elvira-fernandez-irblleida.html

25/01/2016

El tercer o el quart dilluns de gener de cada any es coneix com el Blue Monday o dia més depriment de l’any. El cert és que l’origen, que es remunta a l’any 2005, és una campanya publicitària de l’agència de viatges britànica anomenada Sky travel. Aquesta agència de viatges va idear una fórmula tenint en compte la meteorologia, els deutes acumulats, el salari i altres factors per a definir aquesta data. El terme va tenir molt èxit en els mitjans de comunicació i com ha passat altres vegades, va transcendir a la societat tot i no existir cap evidència estadística. Aquest cas, és un clar exemple de pseudo-ciència.

Des de la Unitat de Bioestadística i Epidemiologia us volem encomanar el nostre positivisme , cap a tot allò que feu o que us proposeu, que us oblideu del Blue Monday, i que feu que cada dia sigui millor per a vosaltres i per a tothom qui us envolta. Molt especialment, la Unitat vol animar a una persona molt única, molt propera a la Unitat, molt estimada i extremadament positiva, però que ara mateix necessita el suport de tots. Molts ànims!

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Blue Monday is the name given to the third or fourth Monday of January, as the most depressing day of the year. Truly speaking, the concept was an advertising campaign created by the travel agency Sky travel in 2005. This travel agency defined an equation that took into account different factors such as meteorology, debts, salary and other factors to predict this date. The concept did really receive an attention from the media even that no statistical evidences held such affirmation, being another example of pseudo-science.

The Unit of Biostatistics & Epidemiology would like to pass on you all our positivism to all your activities and proposals, underlying that this is not such a “Blue Monday” and that you can make the best for you and for the people around you every day of the year. Quite specially, the Unit would like to encourage an extremely positive and loved person, very close to the Unit, that currently needs our help and support. Cheer up!

05/01/2016

Des de la Unitat de Bioestadística i Epidemiologia de l'IRBLleida confiem que hàgiu tingut una molt bona entrada a l'any 1+2+...+63.

I és que l'any que tot just encetem correspon a un nombre triangular - definit com la suma dels n primers nombres enters-, i això va succeir l'any 1953 per últim cop, i no tornarà a passar fins l'any 2080!!

El matemàtic Carl Fiedrich Gauss, que els estadístics coneixem per la llei normal, entre altres aportacions, va demostrar l'any 1796 que qualsevol nombre enter es podia descomposar com la suma de, com a màxim, tres nombres triangulars, fet que va descriure en el seu diari amb la mateixa paraula que va proclamar Arquímedes en el seu descobriment: Eureka! i que s'utilitza sovint quan un científic resol un problema. Els nombres triangulars, en teoria de nombres, tenen moltes aplicacions i poden interpretar-se, per exemple, com el nombre d'arestes en un graf complet. Des de la Unitat hem creat amb R diferents grafs representant nombres triangulars, formant uns patrons molt interessants! Pels R-entusiastes aquí compartim el codi! (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0WyY4bIgK59cEVwX1hjbmhQSzQ)

Esperem que aquest fet sigui un bon presagi per les matemàtiques, l'estadística, l'epidemiologia i la programació informàtica, ciències fortament lligades i indispensables en la recerca biomèdica!!

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The Biostatistics & Epidemiology Unit wishes to all of you the best in this recently started 1+2+...+63 new year!

Indeed, it is worth mentioning that this year's number corresponds to a triangular one -defined as the sum of the n first integers-, which happened last time in 1953 and will not occur again until 2080!

In 1796, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, well known for statisticians for the normal distribution, among other contributions, discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers, writing in his diary his famous words, "EΥΡHKA!, as Archimedes proclaimed, having this currently become an usual practice to celebrate when a scientist solves a problem. Triangular numbers, in number theory, have many applications and can be interpreted, e.g. as the number of edges of a complete graph. In the Unit we have created some graphs representing this triangular numbers as graphs showing interesting patterns. For the R-enthusiasts here we share the code with you! (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B0WyY4bIgK59cEVwX1hjbmhQSzQ).

We hope that this will be a good sign for maths, statistics, epidemiology and computing sciences, which are strongly linked and used in biomedical research!!!

30/12/2015

La Unitat de Bioestadística i Epidemiologia de l'IRBLleida us desitja una bona entrada d'any, i un feliç any nou carregat d'il·lusió i projectes engrescadors.
Us animem a que desxifreu el missatge de la targeta felicitació que hem ideat els membres de la Unitat; un gràfic de dispersió amb un missatge ocult: spoilers no permesos!
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The Unit of Biostatistics & Epidemiology wishes you a happy new year, full of exciting and challenging projects.
We also encourage you to decipher the message in the new year's greeting card, created by the members of the Unit; a scatterplot with a hidden message: spoilers are not allowed!!

23/12/2015

La Unitat de Bioestadística i Epidemiologia organitza regularment seminaris de recerca, anomenats StatisticSc[h]ool, centrats en metodologia estadística i epidemiològica aplicada a la recerca biomèdica, duts a terme per investigadors vinculats a la Unitat o els seus propis membres. A més, en aquests seminaris es potencia que hi hagi una part pràctica, amb portàtils, per treballar amb R en el problema tractat i compartir així el coneixement. Aquest mes de desembre, el Josep Ramon Marsal Mora va presentar el seminari “An application of the Zero-inflated Poisson model in a randomized clinical trial” a partir del treball que recentment ha co-autorat a la prestigiosa revista JAMA. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2469193. Moltes gràces per la interessant sessió!

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The Biostatistics & Epidemiology Unit periodically organizes research seminars, called StatisticSc[h]ool, focusing on statistical and epidemiological methods applied to biomedical research. These seminars are given by researchers with some relation with the Unit or its members themselves. In addition, some laptop time is usually allocated to practice with the problem using R. This December, the seminar was taught by Josep Ramon Marsal, with the title “An application of the Zero-inflated Poisson model in a randomized clinical trial”, who presented some results of a work that he has recently co-authored in the prestigious journal JAMA. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2469193. Thanks for the nice talk!

22/12/2015

Un bon exemple de metodologia estadística potent en recerca biomèdica
A nice example of fancy statistical methods in biomedical research

Nature Reviews Genetics: The authors review the history, prospects and challenges of using molecular clock dating to estimate the timescale for the Tree of Life in the genomics era, and trace the rise of the Bayesian molecular clock dating method as a framework for integrating information from different sources, such as fossils and genomes. http://bit.ly/1S7Ceh7 (£)

22/12/2015

Aquesta setmana el Pau Sales Bayo , economista, ha estat a la Unitat de Bioestadística ; una estada curta amb l'objectiu d’introduir-se en el món de l’R i de l’anàlisi de dades. Esperem tornar-te a veure aviat!

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This week, Pau Sales Bayo, an economist, has made a short research stay with the aim of learning R applied to Data Science. Hope to see you soon!

22/12/2015

Coses impressionats que s'han fet en Data Science durant el 2015
Awesome things made in 2015 in Data Science

Editor's Note: This is the third year I'm making a list of awesome things other people did this year. Just like the lists for 2013 and 2014 I am doing this off the top of my head. I have avoided talking about stuff I worked on or that people here at Hopkins are doing because this post is supposed to be about other people's awesome stuff. I wrote this post because a blog often feels like a place to complain, but we started Simply Stats as a place to be pumped up about the stuff people were doing with data. This year's list is particularly "off the cuff" so I'd appreciate additions if you have 'em. I have surely missed awesome things people have done.

I hear the Tukey conference put on by my former advisor John S. was amazing. Out of it came this really good piece by David Donoho on 50 years of Data Science.
Sherri Rose wrote really accurate and readable guides on academic CVs, academic cover letters, and how to be an effective PhD researcher.
I am not 100% sold on the deep learning hype, but Michael Nielson wrote this awesome book on deep learning and neural networks. I like how approachable it is and how un-hypey it is. I also thought Andrej Karpathy's blog post on whether you have a good selfie or not was fun.
Thomas Lumley continues to be must read regardless of which blog he writes for with a ton of snarky fun posts debunking the latest ridiculous health headlines on statschat and more in depth posts like this one on pre-filtering multiple tests on notstatschat.
David Robinson is making a strong case for top data science blogger with his series of awesome posts on empirical Bayes.
Hadley Wickham doing Hadley Wickham things again. readr is the biggie for me this year.
I've been really enjoying the solid coverage of science/statistics from the (not entirely statistics focused as the name would suggest) STAT.
Ben Goldacre and co. launched OpenTrials for aggregating all the clinical trial data in the world in an open repository.
Christie Aschwanden's piece on why Science Isn't Broken is a must read and one of the least polemic treatments of the reproducibility/replicability issue I've read. The p-hacking graphic is just icing on the cake.
I'm excited about the new R Consortium and the idea of having more organizations that support folks in the R community.
Emma Pierson's blog and writeups in various national level news outlets continue to impress. I thought this one on changing the incentives for sexual assault surveys was particularly interesting/good.
Amanda Cox an co. created this interactive graphic , which is an amazing way to teach people about pre-conceived biases in the way we think about relationships and correlations. I love the crowd-sourcing view on data analysis this suggests.
As usual Philip Guo was producing gold over on his blog. I appreciate this piece on twelve tips for data driven research.
I am really excited about the new field of adaptive data analysis. Basically understanding how we can let people be "real data analysts" and still get reasonable estimates at the end of the day. This paper from Cynthia Dwork and co was one of the initial salvos that came out this year.
Datacamp incorporated Python into their platform. The idea of interactive education for R/Python/Data Science is a very cool one and has tons of potential.
I was really into the idea of Cross-Study validation that got proposed this year. With the growth of public data in a lot of areas we can really start to get a feel for generalizability.
The Open Science Foundation did this incredible replication of 100 different studies in psychology with attention to detail and care that deserves a ton of attention.
Florian's piece "You are not working for me; I am working with you." should be required reading for all students/postdocs/mentors in academia. This is something I still hadn't fully figured out until I read Florian's piece.
I think Karl Broman's post on why reproducibility is hard is a great introduction to the real issues in making data analyses reproducible.
This was the year of the f1000 post-publication review paper. I thought this one from Yoav and the ensuing fallout was fascinating.
I love pretty much everything out of Di Cook/Heike Hoffman's groups. This year I liked the paper on visual statistical inference in high-dimensional low sample size settings.
This is pretty recent, but Nathan Yau's day in the life graphic is mesmerizing.

This was a year where open source data people described their pain from people being demanding/mean to them for their contributions. As the year closes I just want to give a big thank you to everyone who did awesome stuff I used this year and have completely ungraciously failed to acknowledge.