As the academic year is beginning (our courses will officially start next week), this week has seen the arrival of our new students, including those in our MSc Health Economics & Decision Science (I've talked about this here and here).
When we set out the planning, we were a bit nervous because, while everybody at UCL has been very encouraging and supportive, we were also given a rather hard target $-$ get at least 12 students, or else this is not viable. (I don't think we were actually told what would have happened if we had recruited fewer students. But I don't think we cared to ask $-$ the tone seemed scary enough)...
Well, as it happens, we've effectively doubled the target and we now have 22 students starting on the programme $-$ there may be a couple more additions, but even if they fail to turn up, I think Jolene, Marcos and I will count ourselves very happy! I've spoken to some of the students yesterday and earlier today and they all seem very enthusiastic, which is obviously very good!
Related to this, we'll soon start our new seminar series, to which all the MSc students are "strongly encouraged" to participate. But I'll post more generally in case they may be of interest to a wider audience...
Anna and I have just arxived a paper (that we've also submitted to Value in Health), in which we're trying to publicise more widely and in a less technical way the "Moment Matching" method (which we sent to MDM and should be on track and possibly out soon...) to estimate the Expected Value of Sample Information.
The main point of this paper is to showcase the method and highlight its usability $-$ we are also working on computational tools that we'll use to simplify and generalise the analysis. It's an exciting project, I think and luckily we've got our hands on data and designs for some real studies, so we can play around them, which is also nice. I'll post more soon.
Anna has suggested the title of the paper with Bob the builder in mind (so "Can we do it? Yes we can"), although perhaps President Obama (simply "Yes we can") may have worked better. Either way, the picture to the left is just perfect for when we turn this into a presentation...
For some reason, Kobi's favourite thing in the world is flying on an airplane, with making paper airplanes a very closed second and playing airport pretending to check (real) suitcases in and setting off through security as a rather close third.
So it's not surprising that he was quite upset when I told him I would go on an airplane not once, not twice, but three times in the space of just a couple of weeks (in fact, I'll fly to Pisa, then Paris, come back on a train, ride a train again to Brussels and back and finally fly to Bologna and back, all to give talks at several places. From Bologna, I'll actually need to hire a car, because my talk is in nearby Parma).
I think for a moment Kobi did consider stop loving me. But luckily, I think the crisis has been averted and I got him back on good terms when I told him it's not too long until he can fly again...
Yesterday I was Glasgow to give a talk at the Conference of the Royal Statistical Society in the first leg of my September travels-for-talks. My talk was in a session on missing data in health economic evaluation, with Andrew Briggs and James Carpenter also speaking. I think the session was really interesting and we had a rather good audience, so I was pleased with that.
My talk was basically stealing from Andrea's PhD work $-$ we (this includes also Alexina and Rachael who are co-supervising the project) have been doing some interesting stuff on modelling costs and benefit individual level data accounting for correlation between the outcomes; skeweness in the distributions; and "structural" values (eg spikes at QALY values of 1, which cannot be modelled directly using a Beta distribution).
Andrea has done some very good work also in programming the relevant functions in BUGS/JAGS (and he's having a stub at Stan too) into a beta-version of what we'll be our next package (we have called it missingHE) $-$ I'll say more on this when we have a little more established material ready.
The next trip is to Paris on Monday to give a talk at the Department of Biostatistics, in the Institut Gustav Roussy, where I'll speak about (you guessed it...) Bayesian methods in health economics. I'll link to my presentation (that is when I'm finished tweaking it...).
