Application for the course of professor Tamas Rudas "Categorical data analysis" is opened

The International Laboratory for Applied Network Research starts a new format of educational programs - short-term courses in various areas of applied statistics and network analysis. Within such intensive courses lasting from 3 to 7 days everyone interested will be able to get acquainted with modern methods of analysis from leading experts in their fields. The first course will be held on November 29 - December 3, 2017.

Categorical data are data with a limited number of unique values, which can be textual or numerical (nominal, ordinal, binary, count variables) that determine the fact of belonging to certain category. They are usually associated with uncountable signs, such as the names of goods or services, people's names, outcomes of events, gender, countries of residence. Categorical variables are especially frequent in the surveys, since they naturally reflect the character of the person's thinking on the "agree - not agree" scale. For example, the measurement of political views and social attitudes can be carried out on the following scale: "totally disagree", "rather disagree", "difficult to answer", "rather agree", "totally agree". Analysis of such variables takes a special place in statistics, since standard statistical procedures such as linear regression cannot be applied to categorical variables.

This course deals with the most fundamental regression models for binary, ordinal, nominal and count outcomes. While advances in software make it simple to estimate these models, post‐estimation interpretation is difficult due to the nonlinearity of the models. During the course, limitations related to the special nature of variables will be considered, and ways to work with this kind of data will be suggested.

The lecturer of the first short-term course – Categorical data analysis – is invited professor Tamás Rudas - Doctor of Science in Mathematics and Sociology from Eötvös Loránd University and Hungarian Academy of Sciences, affiliate professor of the University of Washington. Research interests of prof. Rudas lies in multivariate statistics, analysis of categorical data, survey methodology, and applied statistics.

We will consider:

• logit and probit models for binary data and Wald and LR tests for complex samples, used in their interpretation

• models for nominal outcomes analysis, including the multinomial logit model

• logit and probit models for ordinal outcomes analysis

• models for count data, including Poisson regression, negative binomial regression, and zero modified models are presented.

A major focus of the class is showing how to use different software for sophisticated interpretation of nonlinear models. The course assumes familiarity with the linear regression model, but is open to a broad audience.

The location of the course is the Study center of the Higher School of Economics "Voronovo". The working language is English. Participation in the course is paid , see details.