Too many things, again....

I did not have much time to post anything this month until now as it has been a quite busy period. I have been involved in many different works and I have also involved other people in what I think could be some very interesting new projects. Not that I complain about having many different things to do (most of them are actually cool) but doing everything in a short period is not the best.

A couple of things have come/are coming up. First, I have seriously started working on the coding of a decision model for some health economic evaluation project I have been involved in since last year. Everything seems ok after I spent lots of days and time fixing some small bugs in my code. I am about half way through the model and I hope I will be able to finish it before Christmas (I doubt it though).

Second, I have finished reviewing an interesting paper about some new methods for improving current practice for dealing with missing data, which I kinda enjoy reading (very good!).

Third, I would like to quickly summarise my first experience at ISPOR Europe in Copenhagen. I was really excited to attend this conference which, as expected, revealed itself as huge with people coming from all over the world and with many interesting sessions and discussion topics. I had the chance to meet new and old people, such as professor Andrea Manca and the always very kind Chris Sampson for whom I was like a stalker asking for more and more information about himself and his work. I also met some of my old collegues from MapiGroup, now under ICON plc. It was very fun to hang out with these old friends and see what they have been up to during this time. Among them, I gladly caught up with my dear friend Ryan Pulleyblank, now doing a PhD at the University of Southern Denmark. My poster was a success with (unexpectedly) many people stopping by and asking for more information on my work. I was genuinely surprised by this as ISPOR is mostly a conference dedicated to companies rather than academic works and networking. To sum up, it was a very nice and fun experience and despite the level of statistical methodology was not particularly high I enjoyed my time there and I also had the chance to visit Copenhagen for the first time.

Finally, as a side note, I have found the time to upload on my arXiv page a nice application of Bayesian hierarchical models for the prediction of volleyball matches which I have been working on the past summer, taking inspiration from the work of Gianluca about predicting football macthes. I hope my work can turn out in something cool as well.

This is all for the moment but soon I will be heading back to another quite busy period for me. I hope this will be the last for some time, especially given that Christmas is coming and I would like to have some free time to properly enjoy this period, which I really like, even more than Christmas itself.