Naomi S. Altman

Associate Professor
PhD Statistics, Stanford
MS Statistics, Toronto
BS Mathematics, Toronto

Summary of research interests

Dr. Altman's interest in statistics stems from her broad interest in science - in particular earth sciences, ecology, archeology, medicine and behavioral science. Her statistical interests include nonparametric smoothing, model selection, longitudinal and spatial data, functional data analysis and data analysis. She enjoys consulting with the local research community and finds inspiration in the applications they deal with.

Dr. Altman's recent focus has been on the analysis of experimental data in which the response is a curve. Examples include growth curves, digitized vocalizations, taste response curves and monitoring of physiological variables over time. She is developing inferential methods for use with models that include a smooth "shape" for the response transformed by individual changes of scale (self-modeling regression). These methods allow the investigator to test for differences in shape or scaling among different experimental treatments, or due to covariates.

Dr. Altman has also been working on various problems in spatial analysis, including parameter estimation, mismatch of spatial measurement scales and the use of various spatial models for prediction and parameter estimation. Dr. Altman have been working with the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell on various problems involving animal vocalizations, in particular whale vocalizations and the Sapsucker Woods Lab of Ornithology at Cornell on problems arising from their citizen science projects, in particular the house finch project. I have also been working closely with scientists natural resources, ecology and population genetics.

Representative publications

1. (1997) Hobert, J.P., Altman, N.S. and Schofield, C.L. Spatial Analysis of the Fish Species Richness of Adirondack Lakes: Applications of Geostatistics and Nonparametric Regression. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 92, 846-854.

2. (1997) Altman, N.S. and Léger, C. On the Optimality of Prediction Based Selection Criteria and the Convergence Rates of Estimators. Journal Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 59, 205-216.

3. (1999) Johnson, K.W. and Altman, N.S., Canonical Correspondence Analysis as an Approximation to Gaussian Ordination. Environmetrics, 10, 39-52.

4. (2000) Altman, N.S. Krige, Smooth, Both or Neither? (with discussion) Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics, 42, 441-461

5. Aragaki, A. and Altman, N.S. Local Polynomial Regression for Binary Response. Computer Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 29th Symposium on the Interface. (2001)

6. (2001) Clark, C.W. and Altman, N.S. Acoustic Detections of Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus) and Fin Whale (B. physalus) Sounds During a SURTASS LFA Exercise (submitted to Journal of Ocean Engineering)

7. (2001) Villarreal, J. and Altman N.S. Self-Modeling Regression with Random Effects using Penalized Splines (submitted to the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics)