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An international virtual workshop entitled Introducing R-INLA and its Applications was held by Statistics Study Program on Wednesday, September 30th, 2020. Attended by 68 participants, this workshop was held virtually because of the Pandemic (COVID-19). Opened by the new Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology, Prof. Dr. Moh. Yasin, M.Si., this workshop starts from 12.30 to 16.15 GMT+7. In his welcoming speech, the Dean was hoping that after the pandemic is under control, he want to invite Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Janet van Niekerk to visit Universitas Airlangga, Indonesia.
“Introducing R-INLA and its Applications, R-Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations” becomes the topic of this big event. It cannot be denied that in Mathematics, and Statistics field, INLA is a popular analysis package in open–source software R. INLA is also known as a fast alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) for the general class of Latent Gaussian Models (LGM). Many familiar models can be re-charged to look like LGM, such as GLM (M), GAM (M), time series, spatial models, measurement error models, dynamic linear models, stochastic volatility, spline refinement, and semiparametric regression.
This event presented Prof. Haavard Rue as the keynote speaker from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, who is the founder of R-INLA. He is the world’s most influential researcher in Mathematics based on a highly cited paper on the Web of Science (2019). His research interests are within computational Bayesian statistics and spatial statistics, and he is the Principal Investigator for the research group “Bayesian Computational Statistics & Modelling”. Most of his research is centred around the R-INLA project. He is currently one of the Editors for the ISI journal Stat.
Besides that, another amazing speaker who was also presented at this workshop is Janet van Niekerk, who is a postdoctoral research fellow at Statistics of KAUST under the supervision of Prof. Haavard Rue. She is a talented young woman with the aspirations of becoming a world renowned statistician. She is the extraordinary lecturer in Statistics, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She also becomes reviewer for many journals such as Statistical Methods in Medical Research, Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, Numerical Algorithms, Communications in Statistics – Theory and Methods, and South African Statistical Journal.
Dr. Janet van Niekerk
The use of R-INLA in Indonesia has not been widely applied to various statistical methods although it is classified as a tool that has been developed in the world for a long time. Regarding the fact that this package has good performance for statistical method implementations, Statistics Study Program tried to bridge experts and participants in Indonesia. That is why the workshop becomes so popular. This is proven by the large number of participants, and the high enthusiasm of them in the discussion session with speakers. The explanation given was very detailed and insightful, starting from the basic concept to its application. This was conveyed in simple language, so the material presented was easy for the participants to understand. In addition, the workshop, which lasted for 3.5 hours, felt so interactive.
The workshop consisted of presentation along with the demonstration in R-Studio. Janet delivered the demonstration very well and interactive. The participants were very enthusiastic in following the demonstration. There were lots of questions from the participants, both in chat and live ask. Prof. Haavard Rue were very cooperative in answering all of the question on the Zoom chat directly. This made the participants feel so touched.
Demonstration in R-Studio
Two days before the conference, Janet sent the demonstration file to the committee. The committee then made some preparations by learning the materials, trying to run the code, and making a tutorial file for the participants. With that tight schedule, they could manage it well. The committee managed to create a Whatssup Group with all participants to have a sharing about the difficulties of installation in RStudio. After the workshop, the participants had a suggestion for not closing this group but change it to the Discussion Forum of R-INLA Indonesia. This is really a good idea.
Many participants appreciated the implementation of this workshop. “Thanks to Universitas Airlangga for mediating us to meet here,” said Sukarna Sume, a participant from Universitas Negeri Makassar. In another hand, they were also grateful for the warm guidance from committee, especially in the help of R-INLA installation.
“We did expect that the workshop would be a success, but the responses from the participants were beyond our expectation. So, it was a Big Success”, said Ulyah, the workshop committee chair.”
