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Locfit(Noxäe, Data=Ethanol, Language A joint newsletter of the Statistical Computing & Statistical Graphics Sections of the American Statistical Association. April 97 Vol.8 No.1 A WORD FROM OUR CHAIRS TOPICS IN MEDICAL IMAGING Statistical Computing Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a Daryl Pregibon is the 1997 Chair Team Sport of the Statistical Computing Sec- tion. While this is his ®rst column By William F. Eddy for the Newsletter, he is familiar It began like this. It was a cold, dreary day in Novem- with the role of Section Chair. ber 1993. I was sitting in my of®ce studying some box- plots when someone knocked. I looked up. It was a This is my ®rst column as Chair of the Statistical Com- rather wild-lookingman, long gray hair ¯ying about. He puting Section, but alas, it is not my ®rst tour of duty. was very animated, his intensity almost scary. ªI'm a Imagine if you will, a time when a well-groomed statis- psychologist; I need some help,º he said. I smiled; it tician could be sighted wearing bell-bottom trousers and was usually the other way around. He showed me a pic- a zipper-front shirt, perched atop 3 inch platform shoes. ture, a slice of a human brain, he said. I commented that These fashion statements are so old that they are now it didn't seem like very good resolution; ªI thought X- back ± so it goes with my tenure as Chair. And as be- rays were a lot clearer than this fuzzy thing.º He said fore, I look forward to the responsibilities that the posi- it was done with magnetic resonance not x-rays and he tion brings ± including the opportunity to write this col- was studying brain function not brain structure. I tried umn! CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 to absorb the idea. He said the picture was not actually a picture of a brain but rather a visual display of a col- Statistical Graphics lection of t-tests, one for each pixel in the slice. I smiled again thinking how silly it was to do thousands of t-tests. He noticed my smile and said ªI don't know any statis- Sally Morton is the 1997 Chair tics but someone told me about `multiple comparisons.' of the Statistical Graphics Section. I've read up on it and I did the Bonferroni corrections.º She welcomes your feedback and My smile turned into outright laughter. ªNothing is sig- comments on any issue of interest ni®cant,º he said; ªplease help me.º By now I was ®gu- to your section. ratively rolling on the ¯oor. We talked a bit more; I de- cided this was not a problem I wanted to work on. I gave Let me begin my ®rst column by thanking Bill him the names of a few colleagues who, I thought, might DuMouchel for his leadership as our Statistical Graph- straighten him out; I imagined a few Bayesian thoughts ics Chair during the past year. I'd also like to thank might thoroughly discombobulate him. I sent him away Deborah Donnell and Jane Gentleman for their service and promptly forgot all about the incident. as Publications Of®cer and Council of Sections Repre- Aside: Just so you have some idea what this is about, I sentative respectively over the past three years. have included a couple of ®gures (page 17). The ®rst is In 1997, Michael Minnotte will be our new Publications a functional image of a brain; it takes about 32 millisec- Of®cer and Bob Newcomb continues as our Secretary/ onds to acquire the data for it (although the duty cycle of Treasurer. Lorraine Denby and Colin Goodall continue the machine and FDA regulations limit the acquisition CONTINUED ON PAGE 3 CONTINUED ON PAGE 17 EDITORIAL Data visualization in the context of large-scale gene expression analysis is the topic of a paper by Daniel Carr, Roland Somogyi, and George Michaels. The tools On-Line PDF Version they propose for looking at gene expression data include This Newsletter marks our ®rst full year as editors. As stereo plots, parallel coordinate (time series) plots and we commented in our maiden issue, we inherited a qual- conditioned parallel coordinate plots. ity publication from Mike Meyer and Jim Rosenberger. Also, make sure you don't miss the article by Clive During the past year, one of our goals has been to main- Loader describing Loc®t, a software package designed tain the standards they set during their three year tenure to be used in S/Splus that performs local regression, as editors. So, you are probably asking yourself, why is likelihood and related smoothing procedures. the quality of the paper not as nice this time around? The Among the several important notices and announce- answer is simple: because we wish to keep offering you ments that we hope you will ®nd useful, let us point out a ®rst-rate product. For many of the articles we publish, the report on the results of the Computing Section's Stu- color ®gures constitute an essential ingredient, but, alas, dent Paper Competition and the announcements for next they are expensive to print. With the money we save on year's competition and it's companion to be sponsored the paper we can offset the increasing cost of color print- for the ®rst time by the Graphics Section. ing and still balance the budget. This issue should reach your mailboxes before the Joint There are, in fact, other avenues that could be ex- Statistical Meetings in Anaheim and contains a timely plored in order to cut printing costs. One possi- article by our Program Chairs, James Rosenberger and bility would be to stop printing the newsletter al- Dianne Cook, outlining our sections' activities at the together. This might be a drastic measure, but we Meetings. The plans are very exciting and we hope to are now offering a much improved on-line version see all of you there. at http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/cocteau/ newsletter/. You can conveniently browse through Mark Hansen the new PDF (Portable Document Format) version us- Editor, Statistical Computing Section ing the Acrobat reader available free from Adobe. The Bell Laboratories old PostScript version is still available, but we strongly [email protected] encourage you to rely on the new PDF version, a much more interactive document due to the addition of arti- cle listings and various links. As we are contemplat- Mario Peruggia ing polling our readers on the issue of phasing out the Editor, Statistical Graphics Section printed version, we would greatly appreciate receiving The Ohio State University your suggestions on this matter. Please, let us know [email protected] what you think and what questions we should ask. In this issue, we feature an article by William Eddy on functional MRI. Bill tells us, in a lively and informal style, how he became interested in the study of brain FROM OUR CHAIRS (Cont.). function, what statistical issues are involved, and why this scienti®c work would be impossible without the co- Statistical Computing operation of researchers from ®elds as varied as psy- chology, radiology and (of course!) statistics. CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 Since my previous term, important changes have oc- In another interesting article, John Salch and David curred on the statistical computing landscape and I'll try Scott describe a novel exploratory tool that they devel- to highlight some of these. Perhaps the most important oped to visualize high dimensional data. The method change to the Section is this Newsletter. While all of us they propose, called the Density Grand Tour, is based now take it for granted as one of the bene®ts as Section on the combination of data exploration along continu- members, it is a very recent innovation. In my opinion, ous paths through lower dimensional projections and ef- it has evolved into the premier newsletter in the Associa- ®cient density estimation techniques. John and David tion, combining interesting (and readable!) technical ar- present examples of univariate and bivariate tours and ticles with timely announcements concerning activities discuss the dif®culties associated with the implementa- relevant to the Section membership. tion of trivariate tours. 2 Statistical Computing & Statistical Graphics Newsletter April 97 Many of us remember the good old days of the sity; our Program Chair-Elect, Mark Hansen from Bell ARPANET, a world-wide web free of banners and Labs; and our new Secretary/Treasurer, Merlise Clyde junk email. But with all the bad comes a lot from Duke University. Complete election results will be of good, namely the Section's web presence at available shortly from the ASA home page. I especially http://www-stat.montclair.edu/asascs.This want to thank all of you who were candidates and all of is the best place to look for information on Section ac- you who took the time to send in your ballots. tivities, including online versions of the Newsletter. On behalf of all the current and newly elected Section The ®nal bit of nostalgia concerns a subject near and Of®cers, we look forward to seeing you in Anaheim in dear to many of our hearts Ð namely data analysis. This August ± have a great summer! subject gained respect in statistical circles in the early 70's. But this pales in comparison to the visibility it Daryl Pregibon is now receiving in computer science circles under the Statistics Research AT&T Labs name ªdata mining.º Is it good or bad? In my view it [email protected] is very good as it provides a tremendous opportunity for statistics to illustrate its central role in science and tech- nology.
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