Stat 450 & Stat 550 Poster Session 2015

STAT 450 students have been working collaboratively with STAT 550 students on real case studies brought by UBC researchers from other disciplines. STAT 550 students created GitHub repositories to host R-codes, related papers, reports, and discussions. These repositories also enable a fluent and effective communication between both classes, and with TAs and instructor. Supervised by graduate students, STAT 450 students performed the statistical analysis and summarized the results in a poster and report. Students of both classes will present their work in this poster session. An abstract of each case is below.

NEW this year:  We will have two eStations to show examples of the GitHub repositories and two shiny applications created by graduate students to explore and illustrate data from their cases. Please, join us in this exciting event!

Poster 1:  Assessing the Impact of Population Control Programs on Fertility Rates in Africa

Researcher:  Richard Togman, PhD. Candidate, Department of Political Science
STAT450:  Kelly Bao, Simon Tai, Gwendolyn Tian
STAT550:  Creagh Briefcliffe, Derek Chiu, Xiaoting Ding, Ho Yin Ho

Countries with high population densities are at greater risk of economic instability. To drive economic prosperity, many developing countries have tried to reduce the overall fertility rates. Using survey data from the United Nations database on developing African countries, we have examined the hypothesis that strength of population control programs has minimal impact on declining fertility rate.If true, then the government should reallocate resources to areas where their impact is actually significant.
 
Poster 2:  Factors of Language Diversity in Sikkim, India

Researcher:  Mark Turin, PhD, First Nations Languages Program and Anthropology
STAT450:  Ho-Hin Leung, Raymond Ye, Jeffrey Yiu
STAT550:  Jeff Bone, Gal Av-Gay, Tanja Hoegg, Elena Shchurenkova

The Indian state of Sikkim is a linguistically diverse province and is home to three endangered indigenous languages, Bhutia, Limbu and Lepcha. As the education system and the needs of Sikkim’s youth change, these indigenous languages are in jeopardy. This project aims to establish characteristics and attributes that affect the number and nature of languages spoken by high school students in Sikkim.
 
Poster 3:  The effect of mycorrhizal networks in signal transfer between Douglas fir trees

Researcher:  Monika Gorzelak
STAT450:  Heather Baek, Robele Baker, Na Nguyen
STAT550:  Bo Chang, Alexi Rodriguez-Arelis, Basia Rogula, Yichen Zhao

Mycorrhizas networks that link trees in a forest are formed when soil fungi interact symbiotically with trees. It has been shown that trees will send stress chemicals to neighbors through these networks in response to defoliation by insects. We are interested in the study whether trees will preferentially send stress signals to genetic relatives compared to genetic strangers under difference combinations of Mycorrhizas networks status and herbivory treatments.
 
eStation 1:  GitHub repository of case study: Analyzing Electric Vehicle Usage Pattern

Researcher: Paul Lusina, Research Associate, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
STAT550: Henry Chen and Ken Lau

As fossil fuel emission is becoming scarcer each year, the UBC fleet management (FM) team is promoting the use of electric vehicles (EV) for operational purposes at UBC. This project investigates the usage pattern of electrical vehicle charging infrastructures used by the UBC fleet in relation to factors such as arrival time, occupancy, and charging duration. A queuing model is constructed to study the capacity of the infrastructure.
 
eStation 2:  Shiny applications

STAT550 students created shiny apps to explore and illustrate the data related to cases 1 and 2 described above.