E.A. Cornish Memorial Lecture

Welcome to the E.A. Cornish Memorial Lecture!

The South Australian Branch of the Statistical Society warmly invite you to attend the 2025 E.A. Cornish Memorial Lecture, held every two years, to be given by Professor Martin Hazelton.

This lecture is the highlight of our speaker program and we look forward to seeing you there.

5.30pm Refreshments

6.05pm E. A. Cornish Memorial Lecture.

7.30pm A dinner will be held after the meeting at Eros Kafe, 275 Rundle St

Please RSVP for dinner to [email protected] by November 14, 2025.

Speaker: Professor Martin Hazelton, Dept. Mathematics and Statistics, University of Otago (NZ).

Topic: Statistical Analysis of Spatial Relative Risk: A 40-year tale of methodological development.

Abstract: Consider data comprising the locations of disease cases and controls over some geographical region. An important epidemiological question is whether the risk of disease varies tangibly across space. To examine this matter, the spatial relative risk function was developed in the 1980s. It is defined as the ratio of the two underlying spatial densities, and can be estimated using kernel smoothing. However, this procedure is often challenging in practice because of the high degree of spatial inhomogeneity in the distributions.

This talk describes the 40-year history of refinements of the original methodology, including improvements to estimators and developments addressing associated inferential problems, such as testing for temporal changes in the spatial pattern of risk. While the spatial relative risk function continues to be widely used in geographical epidemiology, today's state-of-the-art methods have also been adopted by researchers in fields like archaeology and ecology.

Biography: Professor Martin Hazelton is a statistician with wide-ranging research interests. He has worked previously at the University of Oxford, University College London, the University of Western Australia, and Massey University in NZ. Martin was editor-in-chief of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics.

The E.A. Cornish Lecture Series

The Statistical Society of Australia, South Australian Branch, inaugurated a series of public lectures on statistical topics of broad interest in 2001. The lecture series has been named to commemorate Alf Cornish, a leading figure in the early years of the statistical profession in Adelaide.

The lectures are held biennially and presented by eminent statisticians from around the world.

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