Biostatistics Department Seminar: Scalable Distributional Regression via Quantile Functional Regression for Data Streams Including Wearable Devices

Biostatistics Department Seminar 

Title: Scalable Distributional Regression via Quantile Functional Regression for Data Streams Including Wearable Devices

Abstract: In many areas of science, technological advances have led to devices that produce data streams consisting of an enormous number of measurements per subject, including wearable devices, imaging data, and geospatial/temporal climate measurements. Frequently, researchers deal with these data by extracting summary statistics from these data (e.g. mean) and then modeling those, but this approach can miss key insights when the summaries do not capture all of the relevant information in the raw data. This talk will present a general distributional regression framework we have developed for distribution-on-scalar or distribution-on-function regression that models distributions using quantile functions, represents them by sparse, near-lossless basis functions called quantlets, and yields joint inference determining which predictors impact the distribution, while characterizing which aspects of the distribution differ while accounting for multiple testing. The framework is built on the Functional Mixed Model framework developed over the past two decades encompassing any number of discrete and continuous predictors linearly or nonlinearly related to the response, with arbitrary numbers of random effect levels to encompass multi-level sampling designs, accommodating nonstationary spatial or temporal relationships between distributions, and with Gaussian models as well as heavier-tailed options to flexibly handle outliers.

Speaker

Jeffrey S. Morris, PhD is the George S. Pepper Professor of Public Health and Preventative Medicine/ Director, Biostatistics Division at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves as Director of the Division of Biostatistics.

Registration

If you would like to join via Zoom, please register here.

2023-2024 Monday Seminar Series

All seminars are held at 12:05 PM via Zoom and onsite in Room W2008. View all seminar information here.