Statistics Support for University Researchers
Program summary
The Institute for Research in Statistics and its Applications (IRSA) runs a Statistical Collaboration Program that provides researchers across the university with access to expertise from teams of students at the University of Minnesota School of Statistics.
What to expect
Students will meet with researchers to learn about their study, understand their scientific queries, and translate those into statistical questions. Over the course of the collaboration students will propose solutions, implement them, share results, and prepare a deliverable (e.g., poster, report, or presentation). Teams will be supervised by educators from the School of Statistics, and will consist of either graduate or undergraduate students, depending on the nature of the project and the skill set of student groups.
Students may provide support related to:
- exploring data and creating tables and graphics
- performing simple statistical tests such as t-tests and ANOVA
- fitting simple linear models and interpreting statistical results in a manner that is meaningful to researchers
- providing general support on the use of statistical software
- wrangling data
- visualizing data
- designing experiments
- handling missing data
- working with data that has structure such as longitudinal and spatio-temporal data
- performing logistic, linear, and count regression
- advanced methods such as support vector machines, and random forests/decision trees
- performing ridge/lasso regression
- Bayesian models
Program requirements
- Program participants must designate a faculty, post-doc, or a graduate student as a primary collaborator.
- The primary collaborator must have direct knowledge of the study, including the basic scientific questions involved, how the data were collected or the nature of experiments/surveys to be designed, and be available to meet with the student collaborators at least once a week for the duration of the program.
- The engagement period for the program is 10 hours per week for eight weeks; this typically coincides with a summer term, but timing is flexible depending on research needs.
- Initial meetings will include support from School of Statistics educators (Barbara Kuzmak, PhD, and Lan Liu, PhD). These experts will advise student collaborators at regular intervals as necessary.
- Researchers are invited to include students in the life of their research group so they can better understand what researchers do and provide advice and guidance on additional statistics and data science topics.
How to apply
To propose a project for this program please fill out the APPLICATION FORM. Priority will be given to those who show interest by May 20.
IRSA may follow up with you to get further information. This program is subsidized by IRSA and the School of Statistics and no funding is required from the participant, but priority will be given to projects that can help fund the students via research assistantship or fund transfers to the school.
Questions?
Contact IRSAconsulting@umn.edu for answers.
Looking for support on long-term projects? Is your project timeline flexible? Advanced projects may be selected as class projects for the Statistical Consulting Course STAT 8801 in Spring 2023. Inquire about this opportunity by contacting IRSAconsulting@umn.edu.
