Research

This compendium is an outgrowth of the Technical Expert Panel on Maps and Graphics organized in 2009 by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) on behalf of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The purpose of the panel was to “assist the NCES [in] reviewing and... more
Senior Researcher:
NISS conducted research in data confidentiality, data quality, and data integration. Prototypes were built which could scale to operate on large sets of Federally held data. Researchers partnered with several large Federal Government statistical agencies. This topic was of particular importance... more
Senior Researcher:
A critical problem for users of the World Wide Web is that many sites are difficult to navigate, hard to use and have confusing structure. Users may become lost, and they may make large leaps within a website (for example, returning unnecessarily to the home page) that are inconsistent with its... more
Senior Researcher:
Data quality issues were being explored, along with paths to resolve them, for the Bureau of Transporation Studies' (BTS) Intermodal Transportation Database (ITDB). One principal recommendation is that BTS develop a software toolkit that would automate generic aspects of data quality assessments... more
Senior Researcher:
NISS was hired to help develop and build systems that expanded to Federal data but that preserved the confidentiality of the data and privacy of subjects. The systems would respond to queries from networked users of Federal data bases by performing and reporting statistical analyses that extract... more
Senior Researcher:
Technical Report 63: One of the main features of the evolution of large software systems is that change-which is necessary to add new functionality, accommodate new hardware, and repair faults-becomes increasingly difficult over time. This phenomenon, which NISS called code decay, was studied by... more
Senior Researcher:
This research provides surrogate statistical models for the usually deterministic output of complex computer models which cannot be directly explored in great detail because of their size and limitations on the number of runs. The models ate based on a set of runs at selected inputs to aid in... more
Senior Researcher:
Large data sets are a given in modern industry, technology and science and central issues concerning them demand statistical attention. While the need is apparent, paths to bringing statistical science to bear on large data sets are not clearly mapped. General approaches will emerge most rapidly if... more