MATH team successful in DREAM Challenge
Five statistics students from the Department of Mathematical Sciences made a “top performance” in an international competition, which aims to improve the prediction of survival time for patients with prostate cancer.
From left to right: Lisbeth Tomaziu, Maria Bekker-Nielsen Dunbar, Ann-Sophie Buchardt, Niels Richard Hansen, Jing Zhou and Anne Helby Petersen.
The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge is a collaborative community project; it’s DREAM challenge 9.5 in the series of DREAM challenges (www.dreamchallenges.org) on questions in biology and medicine.
The UCPH students obtained a second place in Round 2 of the challenge, which earned them a place on the All-Stars list for the Challenge.
The master’s students are following a project course in statistics, led by Professor Niels Richard Hansen, who proposed the students that they did their project work on the DREAM Challenge data. On the project website he answers a question about what he hopes to gain from participating in the Challenge:
“First, some experience for me and the students on working with predictive models for survival times. Survival analysis is something I teach, but I have not been involved in survival research projects. Second, I find the challenge itself interesting, and the problem of making individualized prognoses important.”
DREAM is an acronym that stands for Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods but over the years it has evolved into the “dream” of collaboration, sharing data, and open science being the norm in science not the exception. DREAM Challenges pose fundamental questions about systems biology and translational medicine.