Abubakari Sumaila Salpawuni

Abubakari Sumaila Salpawuni

PhD candidate (Biostatistics)

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Biography

Abubakari Sumaila Salpawuni is a Biostatistics PhD candidate at the Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. Salpawuni’s research interests include the applications of survival analysis in Medicine, sequential decision processes, and the use of R and Python as programmable tools to data mining. Currently, he is working on his dissertation titled; “Applications of Survival Analysis in Medicine: Bayesian and Frequentist Approaches”. He is also a member of the Bayesian statistics group in the Department of Statistics that seeks to use novel concepts of Bayesian statistics to shape decision making.

Prior to enrolling for his doctoral studies, Salpawuni served as an assistant Biostatistics tutor at the School of Anesthesia, Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH). He has also taught various courses in Statistics, on private bases. Whiles still on his graduate studies, he is also a freelancer on Fiverr where he primarily renders services in data analysis using R and Python. In his free time, Salpawuni enjoys watching football games (English Premiership), reading science fiction and watching movies.

Download my resumé.

Interests
  • Bioinformatics
  • Survival Analysis in Medicine
  • Complex high-dimensional modeling
  • Sequential Decision Processes
  • Data Mining with R
  • Machine Learning with Python
Education
  • PhD in Statistics (Biostatistics), ongoing

    Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

  • M.Res in Statistics, 2019

    Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, Turkey

  • BSc in Statistics, 2013

    University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana

Tutorials

Questions, solutions, projects …

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Tutorial 3: Worked Examples

Tutorial 3: Worked Examples

Introduction This is the third tutorial of a series of common problems in Statistics, alongside some suggested solutions. This particular tutorial primarily focuses on problems (deemed either basic or medium) for undergraduate Statistics (or First years master’s education).

Tutorial 2: Worked Examples

Tutorial 2: Worked Examples

Solving selected problems around methods of moments, maximum likelihood, statistical independence etc.

Tutorial 1: Worked Examples

Tutorial 1: Worked Examples

one-way ANOVA, joint distributions, expectation, variance

External Project

External Project

Re-design Yildiz PhD thesis template in an Rmarkdown environment, inspired the r package thesisdown

My current Project

My current Project

An example of using the in-built project page.

Publications

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Neutral Benchmarking of Survival Models in Health Sciences: Comparative Study of Classical and Machine Learning Techniques
Survival analysis plays a central role in diverse research fields, especially in health sciences. As an analytical tool, it can be used to help improve patients’ survival time, or at least, reduce the prospects of recurrence in cancer studies. However, approaches to the predictive performance of the current survival models mainly center on clinical data along with the classical survival methods. For censored “omics” data, the performance of survival models has not been thoroughly studied, either often due to their high dimensionality issues or reliance on binarizing the survival time for classification analysis. We aim to present a neural benchmark approach that analyzes and compares a broad range of classical and state-of-the-art machine learning survival models for “omics” and clinical datasets. All the methods considered in our study are evaluated using predictability as a performance measure. The study is systematically designed to make 36 comparisons (9 methods over 4 datasets, i.e., 2 clinical and 2 omics), and shows that, in practice, predictability of survival models does vary across real-world datasets, model choice, as well as the evaluation metric. From our results, we emphasize that performance criteria can play a key role in a balanced assessment of diverse survival models. Moreover, the Multitask Logistic Regression (MTLR) showed remarkable predictability for almost all the datasets. We believe this outstanding performance presents a unique opportunity for a wider use of MTLR for survival risk factors. For translational clinicians and scientists, we hope our findings provide practical guidance for benchmark studies of survival models, as well as highlight potential areas of research interest.

Hi there!

Feel free to contact me for a possible collaboration.