Statistical model results may strongly contradict domain knowledge or expectation, which generates many problems considered in this article. In a nutshell, who is right: a statistician stating that advertising does not work (based on the model), or a marketing officer stating the opposite (based on experience or “gut feeling”)? The answer is not as obvious as it seems. All statisticians face th...

Until now, writing has been described in the research literature as the interplay of situations, strategies and phases – with phases being identifiable temporal procedural units with typical dominant writing actions such as ‘formulating’ or ‘source reading’. Phases are recognized as essential for the success of writing processes. At the same time, most scientific approaches to writing base thei...

Corpus based Natural Language Processing (NLP) is now a well established paradigm in NLP. The availability of large corpora, often annotated in various way has led to the development of a variety of approaches to statistical language modeling. The papers in this session represent many of these important approaches. I will try to classify these papers along different dimensions, thus providing t...

In this paper we describe a real-time computer vision and machine learning system for modeling and recognizing human behaviors in a visual surveillance task. The system is particularly concerned with detecting when interactions between people occur, and classifying the type of interaction. Examples of interesting interaction behaviors include following another person, altering one's path to mee...

Images of natural scenes contain a rich variety of visual patterns. To learn and recognize these patterns from natural images, it is necessary to construct statistical models for these patterns. In this review article we describe three statistical principles for modeling image patterns: the sparse coding principle, the minimax entropy principle, and the meaningful alignment principle. We explai...

Creole languages do not fit into the traditional tree model of evolutionary history because multiple languages are involved in their formation. In this paper, we present several statistical models to explore the nature of creole genesis. After reviewing quantitative studies on creole genesis, we first tackle the question of whether creoles are typologically distinct from non-creoles. By formali...

Hierarchical Modeling: Into Statistical Practice Alan M. Zaslavsky Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Pardoe, Weidner, and Friese (henceforth PWF) present a nice application of hierarchical modeling, representative of current practice of this methodology. Hierarchical regression modeling now occupies a methodological middle ground. The main principles have been established, as h...

There are two cultures in the use of statistical modeling to reach conclusions from data. One assumes that the data are generated by a given stochastic data model. The other uses algorithmic models and treats the data mechanism as unknown. The statistical community has been committed to the almost exclusive use of data models. This commitment has led to irrelevant theory, questionable conclusio...