How much we eat, what is safe to eat—these questions are relevant to everyone. In this talk, we discuss how statistics help answer these questions and give a preview to the world of Dietary Risk Assessment. Dietary data are collected to study the dietary habits of a population and for food safety assessment. Dietary studies also provide decision-makers with guidelines in formulating programs to educate people on their eating habits and to evaluate the effectiveness of such programs. We will briefly touch on ideas of ‘zero inflation,’ ‘extreme values,’ ‘probabilistic Bayesian models,’ and ‘mixture models.’ We will also talk about the future for Dietary data analysis using machine learning tools. For more information, http://web.sonoma.edu/math/

Speaker: Ayona Chatterjee, California State University, East Bay