Professor Li Wai-keung officiates the opening and gives talk at the 4th International Symposium on Time Series Analysis held in Guangxi

The Resources and Environmental Statistics Branch of Chinese Association for Applied Statistics (CAAS) organised the 4th International Symposium on Time Series Analysis between 4 and 7 July in Guilin of the Guangxi province. On the conference days of 5 and 6 July, around twenty renowned scholars in time-series analysis, mathematical statistics, and probability from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and Japan delivered topical lectures in their own specialties. At the opening section, Professor Li Wai-keung, Dean of FLASS, introduced the symposium’s honourable guest speaker Professor Howell Tong, the founder of the threshold time series models, to the audience. He also gave a talk at the opening session of the conference.

Professor Huang Wentao, Member of the Standing Committee of the Party Committee and Vice President of Guangxi Normal University and Professor Li from FLASS officiated the opening of the conference on 5 July. While Professor Huang thanked the speakers for sharing their research output, and audience for attending the conference, Professor Li introduced keynote speaker Professor Howard Tong by giving a summary of his pioneering works in nonlinear time series analysis. Professor Tong is Emeritus Professor in Statistics of the Department of Statistics of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“Professor Tong is a pioneer in the field of nonlinear time series analysis, drawing important connections between time series and deterministic dynamical systems and linking statistics with chaos theory. He founded the research on threshold time series models, which have been extensively used in the studies of ecology, economics, epidemiology, and finance. He has made groundbreaking contributions in the fields of nonparametric and semi-parametric statistics. These methodological advancements have significantly expanded the toolbox available to researchers and practitioners working with complex, non-linear time series,” Professor Li said.

After Professor Li’s introduction, Professor Howell Tong, born in 1944 Hong Kong, gave a talk titled “Sixty Years of Teaching and Learning”. Instead of giving a technical talk on time-series analysis, Professor Tong reminisced many interesting moments of his sixty years of academic life. In his speech, the professor recalled his encounters with household names in the field, including Hirotugu Akaike(1927-2009), Maurice Bartlett (1910-2002), Peter Hall (1951-2016), Ted Hannan (1921-1994), Kurt Hirsch (1906-1986), Hua Lo-geng (華羅庚1910-1985), Rudolf Kalman (1930-2016), David Kendall (1918-2007), Emanual Parzen (1929-2016), Murray Rosenblatt (1926-2019), Wang Shao-ren (王壽仁1916-2001), and Peter Whittle (1927-2021).

While the symposium activity was held between 4 and 7 July, talks at the conference were conducted on 5 and 6 July. In the first session on the first day of the conference, Professor Li delivered a speech titled “On a Buffered Moving Average Model”. In the same session, Professor Ruey S. Tsay from the University of Chicago gave a talk named “A New Approach to Modelling Multivariate Threshold Autoregressive Models” and Professor Fan Jianqing from Princeton University made a speech on “Universally Trainable Optimal Prediction Intervals Aggregation”.

The first symposium on time series analysis was held in Beijing in 1984 by the Chinese Mathematical Society and the Chinese Society for Probability and Statistics. The fourth symposium that recently ended was co-organised by the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Guangxi Normal University, the Center for Applied Mathematics of Guangxi (Guangxi Normal University) and the Key Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Research of Data Science of Higher Institutions in Guangxi and sponsored by Guilin Naisi Exhibition Co. Ltd. Around 160 scholars from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Japan, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US attended.