Here are my main research projects, starting from the oldest ones (my PhD thesis), and then continuing on with more recent ones.

Sampling Methodology

My dissertation and my PhD work focused on the development of a sampling methodology for estimating the prevalence of a rare and clustered trait. Our inspirational example was the TB prevalence surveys conducted by the World Health Organization in developing countries. We proposed a sampling design along with an unbiased estimator for the prevalence. We used R to implement our algorithms for selecting the sample and for calculating the desired population estimates. The proposed methodology is an original one which draws on the concepts of list-sequential sampling, adaptive sampling and Poisson sampling, and it achieves the goals of oversampling cases, exploiting the traits characterization and controlling the final sample size.

Publications

Oral Presentations

Ego-centered support networks through the use of survey data

This project was developed during my PostDoc and it concerned the study of support through an ego-centered network perspective. We use large scale survey data not designed for the study of ego-centered networks, thus the use of the data at hand is not always straightforward, and, if necessary we proposed the use of different solutions for solving the encountered challenges.

Publications

Oral Presentations

Bayesian Demography

The use of Bayesian methodology in population studies has become more and more common. In this project we use Bayesian modeling for understanding the determinants and for forecasting human migration flows. We consider both international migrations and migration flows within administrative units of the same country.

Publications

Oral Presentations

Categorical Exploratory Data Analysis

Along with colleagues at the University of California in Davis, I have worked (and keep working) on the use of Entropy measures to understand and decompose variability in ordinal data with applications in the study of self-esteem and self-worth.

Publications

Misc

I also enjoy organizing conferences, seminars, and meetups on R and Statistics. I was part of the Organizing Committee for e-Rum2020, the 2020 European R Users Meeting which takes place every two years. Together with the rest of the Organizing Committee, we published a brief paper where we talk about our experience in turning the event into the first R conference being held completely online.

After a couple of years of experience in teaching Statistics, I published a short textbook that I used for my students in Italy.