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Canberra Branch AGM and Meeting -- Estimation of daily smoking prevalence for disaggregated statistical areas in Australia

When
28 Mar 2023
5:15 PM - 7:00 PM
Location
Hybrid (in-person and on Zoom)

SSA Canberra invites you to its AGM and March branch meeting of 2023, which will feature Sumonkanti Das, Bernard Baffour and Alice Richardson, Statistical Support Network from ANU present present in-person (+streamed online) on the Estimation of daily smoking prevalence for disaggregated statistical areas in Australia.

The Annual General Meeting of the SSA Canberra Branch will be held in hybrid format, both in person at ANU and by zoom, at 5.15pm Tuesday 28 March. All relevant documents; proxy form, Council nomination form, Annual Report, Financial and Membership reports, are on or will soon be loaded to the google drive SSA Canberra Branch AGM documents. The talk featuring Sumon, Benard and Alice will take place immediately after the AGM around 6pm. After the talk, there will an opportunity for those interested to attend a dinner with speakers. Please see below for more details!

Time: 5:15pm – 6:00pm AEDT (AGM) and 6.00pm – 7.00pm (talk)

Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, HW Arndt Building, Building 25A, Kingsley Place, ANU (opposite the CBE Building), or via Zoom. Please see the bottom of this event page for Zoom links.

Note: For in person attendees, the front doors of the Arndt Building lock at 6:15pm so attendees will need to be in before then and they will need to be swiped out afterwards by an ANU attendee.

Dinner: After the talk we will be holding a dinner at Rice Tapas, Level 2/24 Garema Pl, Canberra. (RICE THAI TAPAS RESTAURANT, Canberra - Menu, Prices & Restaurant Reviews - Tripadvisor) If you are interested in attending the dinner, please let me know by 5pm Monday 27 March by entering your details at attendance sheet, or contacting me (warren.muller@csiro.au; 0407 916 868). Please regard this as a firm commitment, not just an intention. For withdrawals after the deadline, please remove your name from the sheet and phone or text me (0407 916 868).

NOTE: We are offering discounts to SSA Early Career and Student members who attend dinner! Specifically, dinners will be a fixed charge of $10 for student members and $20 for early career members. Others will pay their share of the bill, after SSA applies a small subsidy. Typically this is $30-$40. Please bring cash if possible."

Talk details

Speakers: Sumonkanti Das and Bernard Baffour, School of Demography ANU, and Alice Richardson, Statistical Support Network, ANU

Abstract: Official statistics on health outcomes for small domains are highly prized by policymakers and re searchers alike, for measuring and monitoring progress of communities towards healthy lifestyles. Countries like Australia use their National Health Survey to monitor adult health behaviours such as daily smoking. However, the national level health survey data can not be used to estimate accurate daily smoking prevalence at the disaggregated statistical area (SA) level due to lack of information. This NHMRC-funded study aims to estimate the prevalence of daily smoking at SA levels 3 and 4.

Direct estimates of daily smoking and their smoothed standard errors for the domains at SA3 level have been used as input for developing multilevel models, which are expressed in a hierar chical Bayesian framework and fitted by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. The developed models provide consistent estimates at the most detailed level domains by borrowing cross-sectional and spatial strengths. The detailed level domain predictions are then aggregated to obtain estimates at higher aggregation levels. Lower-level prevalences and their standard errors are plotted in a bivariate choropleth map, which permits simultaneous exploration of the spatial distribution and its accuracy.

The performance of the model-based estimates are compared with the corresponding design-based direct estimates. Significant inequalities within and between the SA3s are investigated to look for patterns that suggest policy actions that can be applied at either aggregated or disaggregated domains. These findings can help health researchers and policymakers to deliver programs to the most vulnerable, enabling them to meet their health goals in a timely way.

Biographies

Alice Richardson has been working as the Lead of the Statistical Support Network (formerly Director of the Statistical Consulting Unit) at Australian National University (ANU) since October 2019. Before this position, she worked as Biostatistician at the National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health at ANU and at the University of Canberra. Her PhD on the statistical properties of robust methods of estimation for multilevel linear models was also from ANU. Her research interests are in linear models and robust statistics; statistical properties of data mining methods; applications of statistical methods to large data sets especially in population health and the biomedical sciences; and innovation in statistics education. She is the Principal Investigator of the NHMRC Idea Grants on “Filling in the blanks: a spatial visualisation tool to align national health outcome data with regional health policy objectives”.

Bernard Baffour is an Associate Professor in the School of Demography at ANU. He is also the Secondary Investigator on the NHMRC Idea Grant “Filling in the blanks”. He completed his PhD in social statistics from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, where he investigated the statistical properties of triple system capture-recapture estimators in population censuses; and subsequently undertook a post-doctoral fellowship examining the relationship between weather and health, through quantifying the impact drops in temperature had on hospital admissions. Prior to joining at the ANU in 2017, he was a Research Fellow in Social Statistics at the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland from 2012. He has a diverse range of experience across a wide spectrum of disciplines from education, sociology, epidemiology, public health to operational research.

Sumonkanti Das has been working as Research Fellow in the School of Demography at ANU since 2020, dedicating most of his time to the NHMRC Ideas Grant “Filling in the blanks”. He completed his PhD from the University of Wollongong in the area of small area estimation (SAE) focusing on robust inference in poverty mapping with a particular interest in developing countries. After his PhD, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Quantitative Economics department at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He worked on multilevel time series modelling to estimate mobility trends for small domains of the Dutch population by accounting for survey redesigns. Before joining Maastricht University, he was affiliated as a faculty member of the Department of Statistics, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Bangladesh. He has an immense interest in implementation of SAE methodology in the field of population health, nutrition, demography, and poverty. He also has expertise in multilevel modelling of complex survey data.

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Topic: SSA Canberra AGM + Talk, 28 March 2023

Time: Mar 28, 2023 05:00 PM Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney

Join Zoom Meeting: https://anu.zoom.us/j/88520857358?pwd=YSt4RTgySGRsRnQyQTkvOUFOeXRSQT09

Meeting ID: 885 2085 7358

Password: 129610

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