Professor Murray Aitkin

BSc, DSc, PhD Sydney University

Professorial Fellow

Contact details:

I was trained in Statistics at Sydney University and did postdoctoral work at the Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at Chapel Hill. I joined the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1969 and built up a small statistical consulting group there. I had a visiting year at the Educational Testing Service in 1971-2 as a Fulbright Senior Fellow, and left Australia in 1976 to take up an SSRC Professorial Fellowship in Statistics applied to the Social Sciences at the University of Lancaster, UK. I was later appointed Professor of Applied Statistics and Director of the Centre for Applied Statistics at Lancaster. The Centre developed substantial research and consulting connections with the strong social science departments at Lancaster.

I left Lancaster in 1986 for a sabbatical year at Tel Aviv University, followed by an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the Educational Testing Service. I returned to Tel Aviv as Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences. In 1992 I was awarded an ARC Senior Research Fellowship, initially at the Australian National University and then at the University of Western Australia, where I worked on foundational issues in statistics. At the conclusion of the fellowship I was appointed to the Chair of Statistics at the University of Newcastle, UK, from which I took early retirement in 2004. In 2000-2002 I held a consulting position as Chief Statistician at the Education Statistics Services Institute, a division of the American Institutes for Research which provided consultancy to the National Center for Education Statistics of the US Department of Education. I continued to work as a consultant for NCES after 2002 at Newcastle, and this continues in Melbourne.

Research Interests:

My interests range widely over the theory and applications of statistics:

• Quantitative Psychology
  • Foundational issues in Bayes, frequentist and likelihood theories of inference
  • Statistical computing, especially maximum likelihood and Bayes computations in mixture, random effect and multinomial models
  • Finite mixture and random effect models
  • Survey sampling analysis through modelling
  • Multilevel modelling
  • Item response (IRT) modelling with large-scale testing applications
  • Applications in the social and medical sciences, and education

Professional Associations, Memberships & Awards:

• 1971-2 Fulbright Senior Fellow, Educational Testing Service, Princeton
• 1976-9 Social Science Research Council Professorial Fellow, University of Lancaster
• 1982 Elected Member, International Statistical Institute
• 1984 Fellow, American Statistical Association
• 1992-6 Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellow, Australian National University and University of Western Australia
• Member, Biometric Society, Royal Statistical Society

• Editorial Consultation

  • Consulting Editor, Multivariate Behavioral Research
  • Editorial Advisory Board, Statistical Modelling: An International Journal
  • Former Associate Editor of:
    • Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B
    • Psychometrika
    • British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology
    • Journal of Educational Statistics
  • Biometrics

Recent Funded Research & Research Staff:

Dr Irit Aitkin is a Senior Research Fellow working with me part-time on an ARC grant to examine Bayesian and likelihood approaches to finite mixture, random effect and multinomial models. We are also supported by the National Center for Education Statistics, Washington DC to examine modelling alternatives to the current analysis methods for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Selected Publications:

Books

Aitkin, M., Anderson, D.A., Francis, B.J. and Hinde, J.P. (1989) Statistical Modelling in GLIM . Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Aitkin, M., Francis, B.J. and Hinde, J.P. (2005) Statistical Modelling in GLIM4. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Refereed Journal Articles

Aitkin, M. (1978) The analysis of unbalanced cross-classifications (with Discussion). J. Roy. Statist. Soc. A 141, 195-223.

Aitkin, M. and Clayton, D. (1980) The fitting of exponential, Weibull and extreme value distributions to complex censored survival data using GLIM. Appl. Statist . 29, 156-163.

Aitkin, M., Anderson, D.A. and Hinde, J.P. (1981) Statistical modelling of data on teaching styles (with Discussion). J. Roy. Statist. Soc. A 144, 419-461.

Aitkin, M., Laird, N.M. and Francis, B.J. (1983) A reanalysis of the Stanford Heart Transplant data (with discussion). J. Amer. Statist. Assoc . 77, 264-292.

Aitkin, M. and Rubin, D.B. (1985) Estimation and hypothesis testing in finite mixture models. J. Roy. Statist. Soc. B 47, 67-75.

Aitkin, M. and Anderson, D.A. (1985) Variance component models with binary response: interviewer variability . J. Roy. Statist. Soc. B 47, 203-210.

Aitkin, M. and Longford, N.T. (1986) Statistical modelling issues in school effectiveness studies (with Discussion). J. Roy. Statist. Soc. A 149, 1-43.

Zuzovsky, R. and Aitkin, M. (1990) Using a multi-level model and an indicator system in science education to assess the effect of school treatment on student achievement. School Effectiveness and School Improvement 1, 121-138.

Zuzovsky, R. and Aitkin, M. (1991) Curricular change and science achievement in Israeli elementary schools. in Pupils, Classrooms and Schools: International Studies of Schooling from a Multilevel Perspective , eds. Willms, D. and Raudenbush, S. Academic Press, San Diego, 25-36.

Aitkin, M. and Zuzovsky, R. (1994) Multilevel interaction models and their use in the analysis of large-scale school effectiveness studies. School Effectiveness and School Improvement 5, 45-73.

Aitkin, M. and Aitkin, I. (1996) A hybrid EM/Gauss-Newton algorithm for maximum likelihood in mixture distributions. Statist. and Computing 6, 127-130.

Aitkin, M. (1996) A general maximum likelihood analysis of overdispersion in generalized linear models. Statist. and Computing 6, 251-262.

Aitkin, M. (1997) The calibration of P-values, posterior Bayes factors and the AIC from the posterior distribution of the likelihood (with Discussion). Statist. and Computing 7, 253-272.

Aitkin, M. (1999) A general maximum likelihood analysis of variance components in generalized linear models. Biometrics 55, 117-128.

Aitkin, M. (1999) Meta-analysis by random-effect modelling in generalized linear models. Statist. in Med . 18, 2343-2351.

Parker, L., Pearce, M.S., Dickinson, H.O., Aitkin, M. and Craft, A.W. (1999) Stillbirths among the offspring of male radiation workers at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant. The Lancet 354, 1407-1414.

Zuzovsky, R. and Aitkin, M. (2000) Multilevel longitudinal analysis of IEA studies on science achievement using SISS and TIMSS data. Internat. J. of Ed. Policy, Res. and Practice 1, 243-259.

Alfo', M. and Aitkin, M. (2000) Random coefficient models for binary longitudinal responses with attrition. Statist. and Computing 10, 275-283.

Aitkin, M. (2001) Likelihood and Bayesian analysis of mixtures. Statistical Modelling 1, 287-304.

Aitkin, M. and Rocci, R. (2002) A general maximum likelihood analysis of measurement error in generalized linear models. Statist. and Computing 12, 163-174.

Shaw, I., Newton, D.P., Aitkin, M. and Darnell, R. (2003) Do OFSTED inspections of secondary schools make a difference to GCSE results? Brit. Educ. Res. J . 29, 63-75.

Aitkin, M. and Foxall, R. (2003) Statistical modelling of artificial neural networks using the multi-layer perceptron. Statist. and Computing 13, 227-239.

Aitkin, M. and Alfo', M. (2003) Longitudinal analysis of repeated binary data using autoregressive and random effect modelling. Statistical Modelling 3, 291-303.

Aitkin, M. and Aitkin, I. (2005) Bayesian inference for factor scores. in Contemporary Psychometrics. A Festschrift to Roderick P. McDonald , eds. Maydeu-Olivares, A. and McArdle, J.J. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ (to appear).