Preface (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sim.6362
Published online in Wiley Online Library
Guest Editors’ Introduction Tim Friede,a*† Robin Hendersonb and Philip Hougaardc The 34th annual conference of the International Society for Biostatistics (ISCB) was held August 25–29, 2013 in Munich, Germany. Over 600 delegates from all over the world gathered in the historic surroundings of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University for a stimulating conference organised by Ulrich Mansmann and his team. The conference programme included two key note lectures, six invited sessions, and 34 contributed sessions and was complemented by five short courses and four mini symposia. The President’s Invited Speaker was Hans van Houwelingen; his lecture entitled ‘From model building to validation and back: a plea for robustness’ can be found in this special issue. The topics of the invited sessions ranged from adaptive and biomarker-based trial designs through causal inference in epidemiology and advanced methods in meta-analysis to penalisation approaches to regression. Out of over 400 submitted abstracts, the Scientific Programme Committee (SPC) selected a total of 177 for oral presentation, covering a very broad range of topics. The short courses and mini symposia nicely complemented the programme, with focus on trial design, personalised medicine, and prediction models. The mini symposium on design and analysis of observational studies in medical research led to the ‘STRengthening Analytical Thinking for Observational Studies: The STRATOS initiative’. Furthermore, more than 200 posters were presented, out of which six were awarded a Poster Prize to recognise the importance of poster presentations to the conference. Starting with the third Annual Conference held in Rotterdam in September 1982, notably the year the first volume of Statistics in Medicine was published, it is a long and cherished ISCB tradition to publish a selection of the conference presentations in a special issue of Statistics in Medicine at the end of the following calendar year [1, 2]. A total of 48 manuscripts were submitted for consideration following the 2013 meeting, out of which 15 are included in this issue. Over the last 5–10 years, participation in the ISCB conferences has clearly grown, in parallel with the growing importance of our subject. There are several reasons for this. One is the growth in the amount of data available in terms of number of subjects, as clinical trials, both within and outside drug development, are getting larger, possibly due to the society focus on risk. A second reason is growth in the data available for each subject (such as multi-dimensional gene data and imaging data). A third reason is the growth in complexity of the design of clinical studies. Some keywords for this complexity are adaptive designs, subgroups, and biomarkers. A fourth reason is that it is getting more common with a combination of large amount of data and a data collection approach that is less well defined than the typical clinical trial, and this is covered by the term Big Data. This includes large public registers. All of these issues require a high level of biostatistical expertise, and the ISCB conferences, as well as the journal Statistics in Medicine, are important outlets for sharing our knowledge on this. We would like to take the opportunity to thank all authors for their contributions and all reviewers who helped to prepare this special issue in a timely fashion. Furthermore, we are grateful to Ulrich Mansmann for chairing the Local Organising Committee (LOC) as well as to all members of the LOC and SPC who helped to make the conference a big success.
a Department of Medical Statistics, University Medical Center G𝑜ttingen, ̈ G𝑜ttingen,Germany ̈ b School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, c Biometrics Division, Lundbeck Pharma, Copenhagen, Denmark
U.K.
to: Tim Friede, University Medical Center Göttingen, Department of Medical Statistics, Humboldtallee 32, 37073 Göttingen, Germany † E-mail: [email protected]
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Statist. Med. 2014, 33 5221–5222
5221
*Correspondence
Finally, we hope you will enjoy browsing through this special issue and those readers who attended the conference in Munich might be reminded of a scientifically exiting conference and a few lovely days in Munich in the summer of 2013.
References 1. Colton T, Freedman LS, Johnson AL. Preface. Statistics in Medicine 1983; 2:109. 2. Kim KM, Thompson SG. Preface. Statistics in Medicine 2012; 31:4145.
5222 Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Statist. Med. 2014, 33 5221–5222
Published online in Wiley Online Library
Guest Editors’ Introduction Tim Friede,a*† Robin Hendersonb and Philip Hougaardc The 34th annual conference of the International Society for Biostatistics (ISCB) was held August 25–29, 2013 in Munich, Germany. Over 600 delegates from all over the world gathered in the historic surroundings of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University for a stimulating conference organised by Ulrich Mansmann and his team. The conference programme included two key note lectures, six invited sessions, and 34 contributed sessions and was complemented by five short courses and four mini symposia. The President’s Invited Speaker was Hans van Houwelingen; his lecture entitled ‘From model building to validation and back: a plea for robustness’ can be found in this special issue. The topics of the invited sessions ranged from adaptive and biomarker-based trial designs through causal inference in epidemiology and advanced methods in meta-analysis to penalisation approaches to regression. Out of over 400 submitted abstracts, the Scientific Programme Committee (SPC) selected a total of 177 for oral presentation, covering a very broad range of topics. The short courses and mini symposia nicely complemented the programme, with focus on trial design, personalised medicine, and prediction models. The mini symposium on design and analysis of observational studies in medical research led to the ‘STRengthening Analytical Thinking for Observational Studies: The STRATOS initiative’. Furthermore, more than 200 posters were presented, out of which six were awarded a Poster Prize to recognise the importance of poster presentations to the conference. Starting with the third Annual Conference held in Rotterdam in September 1982, notably the year the first volume of Statistics in Medicine was published, it is a long and cherished ISCB tradition to publish a selection of the conference presentations in a special issue of Statistics in Medicine at the end of the following calendar year [1, 2]. A total of 48 manuscripts were submitted for consideration following the 2013 meeting, out of which 15 are included in this issue. Over the last 5–10 years, participation in the ISCB conferences has clearly grown, in parallel with the growing importance of our subject. There are several reasons for this. One is the growth in the amount of data available in terms of number of subjects, as clinical trials, both within and outside drug development, are getting larger, possibly due to the society focus on risk. A second reason is growth in the data available for each subject (such as multi-dimensional gene data and imaging data). A third reason is the growth in complexity of the design of clinical studies. Some keywords for this complexity are adaptive designs, subgroups, and biomarkers. A fourth reason is that it is getting more common with a combination of large amount of data and a data collection approach that is less well defined than the typical clinical trial, and this is covered by the term Big Data. This includes large public registers. All of these issues require a high level of biostatistical expertise, and the ISCB conferences, as well as the journal Statistics in Medicine, are important outlets for sharing our knowledge on this. We would like to take the opportunity to thank all authors for their contributions and all reviewers who helped to prepare this special issue in a timely fashion. Furthermore, we are grateful to Ulrich Mansmann for chairing the Local Organising Committee (LOC) as well as to all members of the LOC and SPC who helped to make the conference a big success.
a Department of Medical Statistics, University Medical Center G𝑜ttingen, ̈ G𝑜ttingen,Germany ̈ b School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, c Biometrics Division, Lundbeck Pharma, Copenhagen, Denmark
U.K.
to: Tim Friede, University Medical Center Göttingen, Department of Medical Statistics, Humboldtallee 32, 37073 Göttingen, Germany † E-mail: [email protected]
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Statist. Med. 2014, 33 5221–5222
5221
*Correspondence
Finally, we hope you will enjoy browsing through this special issue and those readers who attended the conference in Munich might be reminded of a scientifically exiting conference and a few lovely days in Munich in the summer of 2013.
References 1. Colton T, Freedman LS, Johnson AL. Preface. Statistics in Medicine 1983; 2:109. 2. Kim KM, Thompson SG. Preface. Statistics in Medicine 2012; 31:4145.
5222 Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Statist. Med. 2014, 33 5221–5222
