31st International Biometric Conference Held in Riga

The conference concluded with the awards ceremony in four categories: the International Statistical Institute (ISI) Award, Best Oral Paper, Best Poster (student and professional), and the Florence Nightingale Award.

The winners of the ISI Award were Marcelo Bourguignon Pereira from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil) and Suryo Adi Rakhmawan from Statistics of Population and Employment Directorate, BPS-Statistics (Indonesia) and Department of Statistics and Mathematics, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Mineral (Saudi Arabia).

Daniel Goman won Best Paper with his paper titled “Continuous Time Control Charts”, while Best Poster went to Juan Gonzalez-Hijon with his paper “Unravelling the Link Between Sleep and Mental Health During the Covid-19 Pandemic”.

The Best Poster Award for professionals went to Theresa Ullmann's paper on the topic “Over-optimism in Unsupervised Microbiome Analysis”. The Florence Nightingale Award went to Colleen Chan from Yale University, while Christine Wallisch from the Medical University of Vienna came in second.

Assistant Professor Madara Miķelsone represented the Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) Statistics Unit at the conference with her poster presentation titled “Development of Healthy Ageing Index for the Latvian Population”, which explored the most effective indices. These were examined by factor analysis, thus assessing ageing processes in the elderly, following the guidelines set by the World Health Organisation.

In the paper titled “Severe Bacterial Infections”, biostatistician Eva Petrošina assessed clinicians’ intuitive, or gut feeling about the possibility of severe illness (also known as a sense of alarm) and the possibility of self-limiting illness (known as sense of reassurance), and the diagnostic importance of recognising severe bacterial infections in children with fever presenting to emergency rooms. The author also developed a risk scoring system for classifying children at high, intermediate, and low risk for recognising severe bacterial infections in children with fever.

The International Biostatistics Society celebrated its 75th anniversary this year. It is the largest association for statisticians, mathematicians, and biologists dedicated to promoting the development and application of statistical and mathematical theories and methods in biomedicine, public health, and ecology.

We would like to thank Laura Indrāne (Senior Events Coordinator Radisson Blu) and Verners Martinovs (Baltic Blues Events) for their efforts in making the conference possible.

The conference was supported by BeiGene, Janssen: Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, Rīga Stradiņš University, the Central Statistical Bureau, the University of Tartu, Springer, Roche, and Stata.

The 32nd International Biometric Conference will be held in Argentina, Buenos Aires.