Models for Data Analysis SIS 2018, Palermo, Italy, June 20–22

The 49Th Scientific meeting of the Italian Statistical Society was held in June 2018 in Palermo, with more than 450 attendants. There were plenary sessions as well as specialized and solicited and contributed sessions.

This volume collects a selection of twenty extended contributions covering a wide area of applied and theoretical issues, according to the modern trends in statistical sciences. Only to mention some topics, there are papers on modern textual analysis, sensorial analysis, social inequalities, themes on demography, modern modeling of functional data and high dimensional data, and many other topics.

1 Rossella Berni, Nedka Dechkova Nikiforova, Patrizia Pinelli, Consumers’ preferences for coffee consumption: a choice experiment integrated with tasting and chemical analyses.- 2 Michele Costa, Gender gap assessment and inequality decomposition.- 3 Antonella Plaia, Simona Buscemi, Mariangela Sciandra, Position weighted decision trees for ranking data.- 4 Alessio Serafini, Luca Scrucca, Marco Alfo', Paolo Giordani, Maria Brigida Ferraro, Fuzzy and model-based clustering methods: can we fruitfully compare them?.- 5 Luigi Augugliaro, Ernst Wit, Hassan Pazira, Javier González, Fentaw Abegaz, Angelo Mineo, Using Differential Geometry for Sparse High-Dimensional Risk Regression Models.- 6 Gennaro Punzo, Mariateresa Ciommi, Gaetano Musella, European Funds and regional convergence: From the European context to the Italian scenario.- 7 Maria GAbriella Campolo, Antonino Di Pino Incognito, Edoardo Otranto, Reducing Bias of a Matching Estimation of Treatment Effect in a Nonexperimental Evaluation Procedure.- 8 Giambattista Salinari, Gustavo De Santis, Trends and random walks in mortality series.- 9 Mariantonietta Ruggieri, Gianna Agrò, Erasmo Vassallo, A BoD Composite Indicator to measure the Italian “Sole 24 Ore” Quality of Life.- 10 Michelangelo Misuraca, Germana Scepi, Maria Spano, Network-based dimensionality reduction for textual datasets.- 11 Maria Iannario, Ioannis Ntzufras, Claudia Tarantola, Zero Inflated Bivariate Poisson Regression Models for a sport (in)activity data analysis.- 12 Amalia Vanacore, Maria Sole Pellegrino, An analysis of misclassification rates in rater agreement studies.- 13 Francesca Bitonti, Angelo Mazza, Massimo Mucciardi, Luigi Scrofani, Urban transformations and the spatial distribution of foreign immigrants in Messina.- 14 Silvia Bacci, Valeria Caviezel, Anna Maria Falzoni, Perceived bene?ts and individual characteristics of internationally mobile students: a discrete latent variable analysis.- 15 Laura Bocci, Isabella Mingo, Cultural Participation and social inequality in the digital age: a multilevel cross-national analysis in Europe.- 16 Richard Gerlach, Antonio Naimoli, Giuseppe Storti, Capturing measurement error bias in volatility forecasting by Realized GARCH models.- 17 Gianna Agrò, PCA on environmental vibration data for damage detection on civil engineering structure.- 18 Antonino Mario Oliveri, Gabriella Polizzi, Assessing the performance of the Italian translations of modified MEIM, EIS and FESM scales to measure ethnic identity: a case study.- 19 Federica Onori, Sara Viviani, Pierpaolo Brutti, Towards global monitoring: equating the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) and food insecurity scales in Latin America.- 20 Francesca Di Salvo, Renata Rotondi, Giovanni Lanzano, Functional linear models for the analysis of similarity of waveforms.

Eugenio Brentari is currently full Professor of Statistics, Department of Economics and Management, University of Brescia (Italy). His research work mainly focuses on modern approach to the study of skewness, problem of Behrens-Fisher, and Statistics for sensory analysis. In the board of the Italian Statistical Society from 2014 to 2018. From 2015, he is the coordinator of StatisticAll, the only festival dedicated to Statistics and Demography, held in Treviso (Italy).

Marcello Chiodi is a full Professor of Statistics, Department of Economics, Business and Statistics, University of Palermo (Italy) since 2000. Coordinator of Phd council (2008-2015), Head of the Department (2015-2018), President of the Commission for Professor in Statistics (2019-2022). In the board of the Italian Statistical Society from 2004 to 2008. He wrotes in the area of Statistics in seismology, dependence models, multivariate statistics and approximations to samplingdistributions.

Ernst C. Wit is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland. He holds PhDs in Philosophy (1997, Penn State) and Statistics (2000, University of Chicago) and held academic positions in Australia, UK and the Netherlands. His research focuses on high-dimensional inference and network modelling. He is the author of 120 peer-reviewed publications. He has served as the President of the European Bernoulli Society, President of the Dutch Biostatistics Society and as a Director of the International Biometrics Society.