#82. Old paper by Stephan Morgenthaler

A very interesting survey paper on robust methods, followed by some equally interesting discussions. The survey is highly non-technical and so almost everybody makes insightful remarks, which is very nice to the foreigner.

Stephan Morgenthaler (2007). A survey of robust statistics. Statistical Methods and Applications 15, 271-293.

Here is the list of discussants:
1. Anthony C. Atkinson, Marco Riani and Andrea Cerioli
2. Christophe Croux and Peter Filzmoser
3. Laurie Davies and Ursula Gather
4. Ricardo A. Maronna and Víctor J. Yohai
5. Hannu Oja and Frank Critchley
6. Daniel Peña
7. Peter J. Rousseeuw and Stefan Van Aelst

Filzmoser will be giving one of the plenary lectures at the SMPS 2010, on Soft methods in robust statistics.o

#81. Old papers by Efron and Liang

In lack of good fuzzy papers* on microarray data and other biology challenges in the frontier of current statistical ability, here you are two non-fuzzy papers.


Bradley Efron (2008). Microarrays, empirical Bayes and the two-groups model. Statistical Science 23, 1-22.

Yulan Liang (2008). Statistical advances and challenges for analyzing correlated high dimensional SNP data in genomic study for complex diseases. Statistics Surveys 2, 43-60.


If you are a curious graduate student, please note: It is much more likely that mainstream statisticians will come to welcome fuzziness if used to solve problems they still don't have good solutions to, than if used to solve problems they think they already solved half a century ago.


*Meaning that my few expeditions have been unfruitful, not that there do not exist any. Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.