At the beginning of the year, a large part of the department attended one of the largest statistics conferences in Germany - DagStat. We were represented here with a wide variety of topics and were thus able to contribute to the rich and multi-faceted programme of the conference:

• Quentin Seiferts, Elisabeth Bergherr, Benjamin Säfken, Tobias Hepp:
  Flexible Regression in Neural Networks
  


• 
  Tobias Hepp, Anna von Plessen, Nadia Müller-Voggel, Elisabeth Bergherr:
  Sparse spatial pattern selection via component-wise
  


• Lars Knieper, Elisabeth Bergherr:
  Re-thinking spatial components in gradient boosting
  


• 
  Alexandra Daub, Lars Knieper, Elisabeth Bergherr:
  Balanced boosting for GAMLSS using adaptive step lengths with an application to antenatal care visits data in West African countries
  


• 
  Colin Griesbach, Elisabeth Bergherr: Boosting for Mixed Distributional Regression
  


• 
  Sophie Potts, Elisabeth Bergherr:
  Joint models for rare events
  


• 
  John F. Brüne, Sophie Potts, Elisabeth Bergherr:
  Silent Partys: A Cluster Analysis of Voting Behavior in the European Parliament