Graduate Statistics Club "Informal but Informative" Talks

Synthetic controls...what are they really?
Speaker: Demetrios Papakostas

Abstract: We will give a brief overview of common panel data methods, specifically
focusing on Synthetic Controls. Synthetic controls are a commonly used technique in
many industries, academia, and government. Someone even said, “the most important
innovation in the policy evaluation literature in the last 15 years”. The idea is quite
clever in a way, but also not without its flaws, and at the end of our 30 minutes we will
hopefully see why!

A wastewater-based harmless delay differential equation model to understand the competition of SARS-CoV-2 variants
Speaker: Samantha Brozak

Abstract: As an introduction to dynamical systems, we derive and analyze a
compartmental model for the circulation and competition of two disease strains. While
the assumptions required may be controversial, we show that the model can reasonably
match wastewater-based SARS-CoV-2 surveillance data.