2024 Annual Meeting

2023 Annual Meeting

2022 Annual Meeting

The 2022 Classification Society annual meeting was the first full length meeting of the Classification Society since June 2019. The meeting was organized by Xu (Sunny) Wang at Wilfrid Laurier University. The 2022 meeting featured a complete program that included 3 contributed speaker sessions, 3 invited speaker sessions, a student poster session, and multiple invited lectures and sessions. Highlights of the event included the President’s invited address given by Paul McNicholas (McMaster University) which discussed model-based clustering approaches for multivariate longitudinal data, approaches for 3-way data that do not assume normality, and an approach for 3-way data that are high dimensional. The invited address given by Daniel Aloise (École Polytechnique de Montréal) who discussed a method to provide scores to must-link and cannot-link constraints that are beneficial in semi-supervised classification. The invited session on Psychometric Methodology featuring Hans Friedrich Koehn (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Kim de Roover (Tilburg University) that discussed and gave examples of the value of classification methodology within psychological research. The invited session on advances in model-based clustering approaches featuring Alex Sharp (University of Waterloo), Jeff Andrews (University of British Columbia | Okanagan Campus), and Rebecca Nugent (Carnegie Mellon University) that covered topics in model development, model assessment, and applications to education data. The invited session on applications in biostatistics featuring Lucy Gao (University of British Columbia) that discussed inference for hierarchical clustering. And three invited sessions celebrating the accomplishments of outstanding doctoral students studying clustering, classification, or related areas of data analysis, encompassing associated theory and/or applications. Usually, each meeting of the Classification Society features the winner of that years distinguished dissertation award (https://www.theclassificationsociety.org/distinguished-dissertation-award/). However, due to the travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 annual meeting featured the winners of the 2020, 2021, and 2022 competitions. The three winners were Keefe Murphy (Maynooth University), Michael Gallaugher (Baylor University), and Francesco Sanna Passino (Imperial College London), respectively. In these sessions, a variety of different topics were discussed e.g., the development of families of parsimonious models for model-based clustering, bi-clustering, and model selection in spectral graph clustering.