2018 NCCC170 Annual Meeting

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Jun 28, 2018 — Jun 29, 2018 Whitaker Animal Science Center, Fayetteville, AR 72704
Site Host: Ed Gbur
Program Chair: John Stevens
MEMBERS: Nora Bello (KS), Bruce Craig (IN, Admin.), Sara Duke (USDA-ARS), Susan Durham (UT), Ed Gbur (AR), Carla Goad (OK), Nick Keuler (WI), Alex Lipka (IL), Raul Macchiavelli (PR), Larry Madden (OH), Gayla Olbricht (MO), Guilherme Rosa (WI), Julia Sharp (SC), John Stevens (UT), Walt Stroup (NE), Rob Tempelman (MI), Kathy Yeater (USDA-ARS); USSES Members and Others Present: Andy Bartlett (AR), Jerry Davis (GA), JungAe Lee (AR), Lin Luo (GA), Andy Mauromoustakos (AR), Kevin Thompson (AR).

Thursday, June 28, 2018

8:00 AM
Registration / check-in / pastries, juice, coffee
8:30 AM
Welcome and Introduction
J.F. Meullenet, Director, University of Arkansas Experiment Station
8:40 AM
Quantification of the Genomic Contribution towards Food and Energy-related Crop Traits
Alex Lipka, Dept. of Crop Sciences, University of Illinois
Statistical approaches for genome-wide association studies (GWASs) and genomic selection (GS) have enabled the identification of genomic loci associated with agronomically important traits while controlling for false positives and the use of genome-wide marker data to accurately predict trait values. More...
9:20 AM
Searching for causal networks in experimental data: a swine production application
Nora Bello, Dept. of Statistics, Kansas State University
Efficient agricultural production systems require integrated management of complex physiological mechanisms. Recent developments in network methodologies can enable meaningful directional insight into the inner workings of such complex systems. Motivated by a designed experiment in swine production, we explore potential causal biological relationships between physiological outcomes in high-performing gilts and sows using structural equation models implemented in a mixed modeling framework. More...
10:00 AM
Morning Break
10:15 AM
Discrete Time Survival Analysis Applied to Experimental Data
JungAe Lee-Bartlett, Agriculture Statistics Lab, University of Arkansas
Time-to-event outcomes are common in agricultural sciences. For example, how long it takes until flowering is one of the critical research questions for plant scientists. Despite the popularity of survival analysis in medical studies for past decades, application in agricultural sciences has been less discussed. More...
10:55 AM
Pseudo likelihood or Quadrature? What We Thought We Knew, What We Think We Know, and What We Are Still Trying to Figure Out
Walter Stroup, Dept. of Statistics, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Two predominant computing methods for generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are linearization – e.g. pseudo likelihood (PL) and penalized quasi likelihood (PQL) – and integral approximation – e.g. Gauss-Hermite quadrature and Laplace. More...
11:35 AM
A Bayesian Semi-Parametric Mixed Beta Regression Model for Disease Severity in Plants
Raul Macchiavelli, Dept. de Ciencias Agroambientales, University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Severity progress curves are used in plant disease epidemiology to describe temporal changes in the proportion of plant material compromised by the disease. For diseases with leaf symptoms, typically the damage of several leaves is assessed on each leaf on a particular scale and then averaged to a severity index (SI). More...
12:05 PM
Lunch
1:05 PM
Using genetic relationships to improve the design and analysis of animal science studies
Rob Tempelman, Dept. of Animal Science, Michigan State University
It is well established that if identifiable blocking factors account for a substantial proportion of the variability for key traits of experimental interest, then randomly assigning animals to treatments within blocks should increase statistical power. More...
1:45 PM
Multi-treatment (“network”) meta-analysis in agriculture
Laurence (Larry) Madden, Dept. of Plant Pathology, The Ohio State University
Meta-analysis, the methodology for analyzing the results from multiple studies, has grown tremendously in popularity since being first proposed by Smith and Glass in 1977. Although most meta-analyses involve a single effect size from each study (e. More...
2:25 PM
Bayesian analysis of partial cladograms resulting from free-sorting tasks
Bruce Craig, Arman Sabbaghi, and Mark Ward, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue University
The free-sorting task is increasingly being used to compare the sensory qualities (e.g., taste, smell) of food products. In this task, a participant initially sorts the products into groups based on their perceived similarities and then successively combines the two most similar groups until only two remain. More...
2:45 PM
Afternoon Break
3:00 PM
Exploring interactions in a random forest model
Susan Durham, Dept. of Watershed Sciences and Ecology Center, Utah State University
Random forest methodology offers several strengths that make it attractive to data analysis problems in ecology and natural resources. (1) It can accommodate the “large p, small n” problem of many predictors and relatively few observations. More...
3:30 PM
How to Pois(s)on the Relationship with One’s Colleagues
Edzard van Santen, Dept. of Agronomy, University of Florida
There is probably no state in the Union that has a greater investment in agricultural research than Florida, save California. Like the latter, FL produces quite a number of high value-per-unit-area crops, such as tomatoes, strawberries, leafy vegetables, etc. More...
4:10 PM
Group Discussion: Visualizing Group Means
Matt Kramer, USDA, via Walt Stroup
When researchers report study results, they often want to visualize group means with ± (2) SE (or SEM) bars, and use their overlap (or not) to summarize significant differences between group means. More...

Friday, June 29, 2018

8:15 AM
Check-in / pastries, juice, coffee
8:45 AM
Revising an Introductory Statistics Curriculum from the Ground Up – Challenges, Solutions, and Lessons Learned
Nicholas Keuler and Jun Zhu, Dept. of Statistics, University of Wisconsin
For the past few years, the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin- Madison has been engaged in a revision of the curriculum for introductory statistics courses targeted to non-statistics majors. More...
9:05 AM
Group Discussion: Journal Needs
Are current journals (JABES in particular) meeting our needs and expectations, and can we as a group put together a statement for JABES to summarize our concerns and possible solutions? More...
9:25 AM
Business Meeting
9:45 AM
Adjourn