The concept of utilizing big data to enable scientific discovery has generated tremendous excitement and investment from both private and public sectors over the past decade, and expectations continue to grow. Using big data analytics to identify complex patterns hidden inside volumes of data that have never been combined could accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and lead to the development of beneficial technologies and products. However, producing actionable scientific knowledge from such large, complex data sets requires statistical models that produce reliable inferences (NRC, 2013). Without careful consideration of the suitability of both available data and the statistical models applied, analysis of big data may result in misleading correlations and false discoveries, which can potentially undermine confidence in scientific research if the results are not reproducible. In June 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to examine critical challenges and opportunities in performing scientific inference reliably when working with big data. Participants explored new methodologic developments that hold significant promise and potential research program areas for the future. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

The concept of utilizing big data to enable scientific discovery has generated tremendous excitement and investment from both private and public sectors over the past decade, and expectations continue to grow. Using big data analytics to identify complex patterns hidden inside volumes of data that have never been combined could accelerate the rate of scientific discovery and lead to the development of beneficial technologies and products. However, producing actionable scientific knowledge from such large, complex data sets requires statistical models that produce reliable inferences (NRC, 2013). Without careful consideration of the suitability of both available data and the statistical models applied, analysis of big data may result in misleading correlations and false discoveries, which can potentially undermine confidence in scientific research if the results are not reproducible. In June 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop to examine critical challenges and opportunities in performing scientific inference reliably when working with big data. Participants explored new methodologic developments that hold significant promise and potential research program areas for the future. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

This book presents recent research on predictive econometrics and big data. Gathering edited papers presented at the 11th International Conference of the Thailand Econometric Society (TES2018), held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on January 10-12, 2018, its main focus is on predictive techniques – which directly aim at predicting economic phenomena; and big data techniques – which enable us to handle the enormous amounts of data generated by modern computers in a reasonable time. The book also discusses the applications of more traditional statistical techniques to econometric problems. Econometrics is a branch of economics that employs mathematical (especially statistical) methods to analyze economic systems, to forecast economic and financial dynamics, and to develop strategies for achieving desirable economic performance. It is therefore important to develop data processing techniques that explicitly focus on prediction. The more data we have, the better our predictions will be. As such, these techniques are essential to our ability to process huge amounts of available data.

The general theme of this book is to encourage the use of relevant methodology in data mining which is or could be applied to the interplay of education, statistics and computer science to solve psychometric issues and challenges in the new generation of assessments. In addition to item response data, other data collected in the process of assessment and learning will be utilized to help solve psychometric challenges and facilitate learning and other educational applications. Process data include those collected or available for collection during the process of assessment and instructional phase such as responding sequence data, log files, the use of help features, the content of web searches, etc. Some book chapters present the general exploration of process data in large-scale assessment. Further, other chapters also address how to integrate psychometrics and learning analytics in assessment and survey, how to use data mining techniques for security and cheating detection, how to use more assessment results to facilitate student’s learning and guide teacher’s instructional efforts. The book includes both theoretical and methodological presentations that might guide the future in this area, as well as illustrations of efforts to implement big data analytics that might be instructive to those in the field of learning and psychometrics. The context of the effort is diverse, including K-12, higher education, financial planning, and survey utilization. It is hoped that readers can learn from different disciplines, especially those who are specialized in assessment, would be critical to expand the ideas of what we can do with data analytics for informing assessment practices.

Our ability to observe and forecast severe weather events has improved markedly over the past few decades. Forecasts of snow and ice storms, hurricanes and storm surge, extreme heat, and other severe weather events are made with greater accuracy, geographic specificity, and lead time to allow people and communities to take appropriate protective measures. Yet hazardous weather continues to cause loss of life and result in other preventable social costs. There is growing recognition that a host of social and behavioral factors affect how we prepare for, observe, predict, respond to, and are impacted by weather hazards. For example, an individual's response to a severe weather event may depend on their understanding of the forecast, prior experience with severe weather, concerns about their other family members or property, their capacity to take the recommended protective actions, and numerous other factors. Indeed, it is these factors that can determine whether or not a potential hazard becomes an actual disaster. Thus, it is essential to bring to bear expertise in the social and behavioral sciences (SBS)â€"including disciplines such as anthropology, communication, demography, economics, geography, political science, psychology, and sociologyâ€"to understand how people's knowledge, experiences, perceptions, and attitudes shape their responses to weather risks and to understand how human cognitive and social dynamics affect the forecast process itself. Integrating Social and Behavioral Sciences Within the Weather Enterprise explores and provides guidance on the challenges of integrating social and behavioral sciences within the weather enterprise. It assesses current SBS activities, describes the potential value of improved integration of SBS and barriers that impede this integration, develops a research agenda, and identifies infrastructural and institutional arrangements for successfully pursuing SBS-weather research and the transfer of relevant findings to operational settings.

The U.S. system of graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has served the nation and its science and engineering enterprise extremely well. Over the course of their education, graduate students become involved in advancing the frontiers of discovery, as well as in making significant contributions to the growth of the U.S. economy, its national security, and the health and well-being of its people. However, continuous, dramatic innovations in research methods and technologies, changes in the nature and availability of work, shifts in demographics, and expansions in the scope of occupations needing STEM expertise raise questions about how well the current STEM graduate education system is meeting the full array of 21st century needs. Indeed, recent surveys of employers and graduates and studies of graduate education suggest that many graduate programs do not adequately prepare students to translate their knowledge into impact in multiple careers. Graduate STEM Education for the 21st Century examines the current state of U.S. graduate STEM education. This report explores how the system might best respond to ongoing developments in the conduct of research on evidence-based teaching practices and in the needs and interests of its students and the broader society it seeks to serve. This will be an essential resource for the primary stakeholders in the U.S. STEM enterprise, including federal and state policymakers, public and private funders, institutions of higher education, their administrators and faculty, leaders in business and industry, and the students the system is intended to educate.

The amount of new information is constantly increasing, faster than our ability to fully interpret and utilize it to improve human experiences. Addressing this asymmetry requires novel and revolutionary scientific methods and effective human and artificial intelligence interfaces. By lifting the concept of time from a positive real number to a 2D complex time (kime), this book uncovers a connection between artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and quantum mechanics. It proposes a new mathematical foundation for data science based on raising the 4D spacetime to a higher dimension where longitudinal data (e.g., time-series) are represented as manifolds (e.g., kime-surfaces). This new framework enables the development of innovative data science analytical methods for model-based and model-free scientific inference, derived computed phenotyping, and statistical forecasting. The book provides a transdisciplinary bridge and a pragmatic mechanism to translate quantum mechanical principles, such as particles and wavefunctions, into data science concepts, such as datum and inference-functions. It includes many open mathematical problems that still need to be solved, technological challenges that need to be tackled, and computational statistics algorithms that have to be fully developed and validated. Spacekime analytics provide mechanisms to effectively handle, process, and interpret large, heterogeneous, and continuously-tracked digital information from multiple sources. The authors propose computational methods, probability model-based techniques, and analytical strategies to estimate, approximate, or simulate the complex time phases (kime directions). This allows transforming time-varying data, such as time-series observations, into higher-dimensional manifolds representing complex-valued and kime-indexed surfaces (kime-surfaces). The book includes many illustrations of model-based and model-free spacekime analytic techniques applied to economic forecasting, identification of functional brain activation, and high-dimensional cohort phenotyping. Specific case-study examples include unsupervised clustering using the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (MCSI), model-based inference using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, and model-free inference using the UK Biobank data archive. The material includes mathematical, inferential, computational, and philosophical topics such as Heisenberg uncertainty principle and alternative approaches to large sample theory, where a few spacetime observations can be amplified by a series of derived, estimated, or simulated kime-phases. The authors extend Newton-Leibniz calculus of integration and differentiation to the spacekime manifold and discuss possible solutions to some of the "problems of time". The coverage also includes 5D spacekime formulations of classical 4D spacetime mathematical equations describing natural laws of physics, as well as, statistical articulation of spacekime analytics in a Bayesian inference framework. The steady increase of the volume and complexity of observed and recorded digital information drives the urgent need to develop novel data analytical strategies. Spacekime analytics represents one new data-analytic approach, which provides a mechanism to understand compound phenomena that are observed as multiplex longitudinal processes and computationally tracked by proxy measures. This book may be of interest to academic scholars, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, artificial intelligence and machine learning engineers, biostatisticians, econometricians, and data analysts. Some of the material may also resonate with philosophers, futurists, astrophysicists, space industry technicians, biomedical researchers, health practitioners, and the general public.