Planes trains and automobiles
Thu, 7 Sep, 2017 2 min read
For some reason, Kobi's favourite thing in the world is flying on an airplane, with making paper airplanes a very closed second and playing airport pretending to check (real) suitcases in and setting off through security as a rather close third.
So it's not surprising that he was quite upset when I told him I would go on an airplane not once, not twice, but three times in the space of just a couple of weeks (in fact, I'll fly to Pisa, then Paris, come back on a train, ride a train again to Brussels and back and finally fly to Bologna and back, all to give talks at several places. From Bologna, I'll actually need to hire a car, because my talk is in nearby Parma).
I think for a moment Kobi did consider stop loving me. But luckily, I think the crisis has been averted and I got him back on good terms when I told him it's not too long until he can fly again…
Yesterday I was Glasgow to give a talk at the Conference of the Royal Statistical Society in the first leg of my September travels-for-talks. My talk was in a session on missing data in health economic evaluation, with Andrew Briggs and James Carpenter also speaking. I think the session was really interesting and we had a rather good audience, so I was pleased with that.
My talk was basically stealing from Andrea's PhD work $-$ we (this includes also Alexina and Rachael who are co-supervising the project) have been doing some interesting stuff on modelling costs and benefit individual level data accounting for correlation between the outcomes; skeweness in the distributions; and "structural" values (eg spikes at QALY values of 1, which cannot be modelled directly using a Beta distribution).
Andrea has done some very good work also in programming the relevant functions in BUGS/JAGS (and he's having a stub at Stan too) into a beta-version of what we'll be our next package (we have called it missingHE) $-$ I'll say more on this when we have a little more established material ready.
The next trip is to Paris on Monday to give a talk at the Department of Biostatistics, in the Institut Gustav Roussy, where I'll speak about (you guessed it…) Bayesian methods in health economics. I'll link to my presentation (that is when I'm finished tweaking it…).
Bayesian statistics Health economics Software
Picky people (2)
Picky people
New year resolution