Daniel J. Frobish, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Statistics
MAK A1164
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
Office: (616)-331-3028
Dept office: (616)-331-3355
Email: frobishd at gvsu dot edu
I am
originally from Illinois, attending the University of Illinois for my
bachelor’s degree in math, Illinois State University for my master’s degree in
math (as well as teacher certification in math for grades 6-12), and Northern
Illinois University for my PhD in statistics.
I came to GVSU in 2006, and was tenured and promoted to associate
professor in 2012.
The purpose of this
website is solely for potential REU students to see if they would like to apply
for the specific project that I would supervise. All other inquiries can be sent to my email
address.
For
application information and instructions for REU, please visit http://www.gvsu.edu/mathreu/
REU Project
Description: My area of specialty is Survival Analysis,
which is concerned with developing models for time to event variables, based on
a list of potential predictor variables.
Examples of time to event variables include:
·
Time
to death
·
Time
in remission from cancer
·
Time
to germination for a species of plant
·
Time
in foreclosure for residential properties
·
Time
until breakdown for a machine
For example, if we are
interested in the length of time in remission from cancer, then we want to
answer if this length of time is related to
other explanatory variables, such as treatment group, gender, age, or other
demographic variables. It is well
established how to build models to answer these questions, when the number of
explanatory variables is reasonably small, relative to the sample size.
However,
when the number of explanatory variables is large, it is not clear what
approaches should be taken. For example,
we can now measure to what extent human genes are expressed by measuring how
much protein each gene produces. Because
there are many thousands of genes, there can be many more explanatory variables
than sample size (“big data” are becoming more prevalent outside of genetics as
well). More than a few techniques have
been proposed to handle these situations in survival analysis, but little work
has been done in terms of determining which ones perform well under various
circumstances.
As an additional component, in
survival analysis, we are interested in time to event, but in some cases, some
individuals will not ever experience the event, even if they are followed
indefinitely. This has obvious
applications in medical fields, where a major goal is to cure diseases, and
being able to use gene expression as inputs to this kind of analysis is
extremely important. The simulation
studies we will perform will also account for this possibility of cure, and
there is nothing in the statistical literature about incorporating the
potential for cure, when the data set has many thousands of potential
explanatory variables.
What this experience will involve for students:
·
Learning
background (survival analysis, dimension reduction methods)
·
Learning
how to use R if needed
·
Programming
simulations
·
Evaluating
simulations
·
Preparing
manuscript for submission to refereed journal for publication
Desirable
qualifications of students:
·
At
least one statistics course at the college level that involves hypothesis
testing and basic probability (probability density functions and cumulative
distribution functions for continuous random variables).
·
Experience
programming in the statistical software R (helpful, but not required). https://cran.r-project.org/