Newsletter winter'21-22

20/12/2021
                      Message from the president

 

Dear all, a new Council has started its work and I have the honor to guide the Association until 2025. I wish to thank all those who have placed their trust in me, the whole past council, and the past President Juan José Egozcue. Thank you very much! I know that the new council will work hard to increase our weight in the scientific community as well as the debate on methods and new paths to understand phenomena of our surrounding complex world from the CoDa perspective.

The number of papers that in different research fields consider tools concerning compositional data analysis is constantly increasing and in 2021 up to now it is equal to 155! A list downloaded from the Scopus database is reported here https://www.coda-association.org/en/newsletters/. We wish to maintain a constant upgrade to inform our community about news on research having CoDa as a fundamental target.

In January 2021 an interesting paper appeared in the Austrian Journal of Statistics by Navarro-Lopez et al (doi:10.17713/ajs.v50i2.1066) focused on a bibliometric analysis in the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the paper “The Statistical Analysis of Compositional Data” by John Aitchison published in 1982, a paper having  by October 2019 about 780 citations. Results indicate that in the period 1983-2019 Mathematics and Geology are the most important research areas using CoDa followed by Environmental Science Ecology. However, the results indicate that the CoDa approach is now disseminated in all branches of natural, economic and social sciences.  The paper offers an interesting reading about people and institutions that around the world have cited Aitchison’s paper as well as their connections.

I just want to wish everyone good work with the hope of meeting in person, face to face, after the hard pandemic period, in the next CoDa Meeting in Toulouse!

Antonella Buccianti

News shared by members

  1. Call for Papers: CoDa session at the IFCS 2022

Dear CoDa community,
we are proud to announce a thematic track on Compositional Data Analysis in the IFCS 2022.  A track is a series of sessions on the same theme, the Compositional Data Analysis.
The IFCS'22 (17th Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies) will be held in Porto, Portugal from July 19th to 23rd.  
You can find more information in the website: https://ifcs2022.fep.up.pt/
We would be very grateful if you want to present your work in the CoDa track or if you can forward this announcement to your contacts.
Kind CoDa-regards
Glòria Mateu-Figueras and Peter Filzmoser

  1. J. Lewi, forefather of T-Spaces

In Lewi (1976) the problem of classifying biological activity profiles of chemical compounds is addressed, which the author calls spectral mapping. In the introduction, Paul J. Lewi, states that biological activity (or activity spectrum) of some compound can be expressed by the minimum effective doses observed in a number of assays. His aim is the classification of compounds that share a (possibly unknown) mechanism of action. But to do that, he sees the need to separate first the relative potency of each compound from its activity spectrum.

It was a surprise to realise that the way to achieve this, called by Lewi potency mapping and spectral mapping, was nothing else but working effectively with the tools developed for compositional data with a total (Pawlowsky-Glahn et al., 2015), albeit more than twenty years before. Certainly, the spectral mapping exactly corresponds to an early example of isometric logratio transformation (ilr) (Egozcue et al., 2003), and the potency spectrum to the product total suggested in Pawlowsky-Glahn et al. (2015).

We would like to thank M. Greenacre for bringing to our attention this contribution, which we were not aware of, and which we probably would not have come across due to the differing terminology used by Lewi. Lewi seems not to have been aware of the mathematical implications of his developments, but he was clearly ahead of his time following intuitively a proper way to go.

Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn and Juan José Egozcue, November 2021

References

  • Egozcue, J. J., V. Pawlowsky-Glahn, G. Mateu-Figueras, and C. Barceló-Vidal (2003). Isometric logratio transformations for compositional data analysis. Mathematical Geology 35(3), 279–300.
  • Lewi, P. (1976). Spectral mapping, a technique for classifying biological activity profiles of chemical compounds. Arzneimittelforschung (Drug Research) 26, 1295–1300.
    Pawlowsky-Glahn, V., J. J. Egozcue, and D. Lovell (2015). Tools for compositional data with a total. Statistical Modelling 15(2), 175–190.

 

  1. Call for papers CoDaWork2022 and Special Issues  

Dear all,

It is a pleasure to announce the 9th International Workshop on Compositional Data Analysis (CoDaWork2022), to be held in Toulouse (France), 28 June - 1 July 2022.

Updated Information about the 9th CoDa-Work can be found here: https://www.coda-association.org/en/codawork2022/.

Prior to the Workshop, a one-day course on compositional data will be offered.

 Abstracts of the contributions are due January 16, 2022, and registration is already open.

The following journals have both agreed to publish special issues with selected papers presented at CoDaWork2022. Both are open access and have no article processing charges.

  • SORT-Statistics and Operations Research Transactions (https://raco.cat/index.php/SORT) is listed at JCR (IF 1.19 -Q3) and SCOPUS (SJR 36 -Q3). Guest editors: Germà Coenders and Javier Palarea-Albaladejo.
  • The Austrian Journal of Statistics (https://www.ajs.or.at/index.php) is listed at ESCI (JCI 0.33 -Q4) and SCOPUS (SJR 0.34 -Q3). Guest editors: Peter Filzmoser and Karel Hron.

We hope to meet you at the conference next June. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions at oc-codawork2022@tse-fr.eu.

Christine Thomas-Agnan, Chair of CoDaWork2022 and Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn, Chair of the Scientific Committee of CoDaWork202 

       

 

 

News shared by the council

  1. Continuation of the Grants Commission and Meetings Committee

Given that during the period 2020-2021 both commissions could not undertake their activities, the council decided to invite Maribel Ortego-Martínez, Alessandra Menafoglio, Gregory Gloor, and Josep Antoni Martín Fernández (non-voting Council Delegate) to continue to be members of the Meetings Committee, as well as to invite Caterina Gozzi, Kamila Fačevicová, Gregory Gloor, and Josep Antoni Martín Fernández (non-voting Council Delegate) to continue to be members of the Grants Commission for the period 2021-2022.

The council has decided to reactivate the Grants Commission for 2021-2022, with the purpose of calling for student applications to grants, consisting in a free registration to CoDaWork 2022 (https://www.coda-association.org/en/coda-info/news-info/grants-to-attend-codawork-2022/). Afterwards, the Commission will choose the best candidates for the available number of grants.

  1. Message from Treasurer of the CoDa-Association

Dear members,

I am glad to announce that this year, the members Antonella Buccianti, Juan José Egozcue and Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn have arranged for their royalties of the books 

     

Modeling and Analysis of Compositional Data

Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn, Juan José Egozcue, Raimon Tolosana-Delgado

ISBN: 978-1-118-44306-4 March 2015 272 Pages

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Modeling+and+Analysis+of+Compositional+Data-p-9781118443064

 
     

Compositional Data Analysis: Theory and Applications

Vera Pawlowsky-Glahn (Editor), Antonella Buccianti (Editor)

ISBN: 978-0-470-71135-4 September 2011 400 Pages

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Compositional+Data+Analysis%3A+Theory+and+Applications-p-9780470711354

 

 

to be paid to the CoDa Association. 

Thank you very much Antonella, Juanjo and Vera!

CoDa-yours,

Martin, Treasurer CoDa Association

 

  1. Message about the week-CoDaCourse 2022

Dear colleagues,

We are delighted to announce that our one-week Compositional Data Analysis course (the week-CoDaCourse) is scheduled to be back face-to-face in 2022. This will be the 9th edition of the course to be held in Girona (Spain) from the 4th to the 8th of July 2022.

The registration is now OPEN. Please visit http://www.compositionaldata.com/codacourses.php for registration and further details.

This course provides an introduction to the methodological and practical aspects of the statistical analysis of compositional data, as well as an informal forum for discussion. The lectures review the fundamentals and the current state of the art in the field. The practical sessions focus on the application of CoDa techniques and their interpretation using current software packages. An open discussion session is also planned. The attendants are encouraged to bring their own research problems and data sets for discussion.

With best CoDa-regards,

Javier Palarea-Albaladejo, Chair of CoDaCourse 2022

 

  1. Series of CoDa-Webinars

 The webinar entitled “Robust Differential Abundance Test in Compositional Data” given by Shulei Wang, was held on the 20th October 2021 and was the first of a new CoDa-Association Seasonal Seminar series initiative.

Next webinar, titled “Independent Component Analysis for Compositional Data”, will be given by Klaus Nordhausen, on the 21st of January 2022 at 11:00h (CET). Save the date! Further information and the link to connect will be sent in due time.

Klaus Nordhausen is University Lecturer at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Jyväskylä. We encourage the CoDa community to participate in the seminar series! Contact Gianna Monti (codaassoc2@coda-association.org) and Javier Palarea (vice-president@coda-association.org) if you would like to give and/or propose a seminar.