* Many people are not yet subscribed to the statslausanne mailing-list; please forward appropriately to your colleagues * * NOTE: for those of you who came to this meeting previously, the location has changed * Our next statistics forum for people interested in quantitative methods in biology and medicine will take place this Thursday, 10 May at 11h00 at the IUMSP, Biopôle 2, route de la Corniche 10, in the conference room (1st floor). The speaker will be Alfio Marazzi, from the IUMSP, who will talk about "The analysis of hospital cost and length of stays: robust estimation of the generalized loggamma model." Abstract: In the first non-technical part of my talk, I will motivate the use of robust statistics in the analysis of hospital length and cost of stay. Several methods for robust regression with asymmetric errors have been developed for this purpose. In the second technical part of the talk, I will briefly present a recently developed robust method to estimate the generalized loggamma model (a very flexible family of bsymmetric and asymmetric distributions, including normal, log-Weibull, and log-gamma). You can find more information about the forum on our web page at http://moodle.unil.ch/course/view.php?id=2729 Hope to see you there ! Frédéric