May 26-28, 2025: SAA Conference in Leuven

Linus, Constantin, Jan, Sandro and Mirka in Belgium

Linus, Jan, Constantin, Sandro and Mirka attended the "Society for Ambulatory Assessment" conference in Leuven at the end of May, where we gained many exciting insights into the latest research on experience sampling methods. Linus also presented his researches on decision trees with multilevel data as a poster. Many thanks also to Niels Vanhasbroeck, who presented the study "Affect dynamics or response bias" (Mirka, Niels & Francis Tuerlinckx, 2025) on behalf of Mirka due to a scheduling conflict (click on the tile to get to the paper). The (prospective) PhD students - also known as "Die Rasselbande" - rounded off their three-day stay in the beautiful Leuven with a visit to the games hall. The trip was marked by heated duels in basketball, air field hockey and Mario Kart as well as controversial dance interludes - it was great!

19. May 2025: Teaching Excellence Awards 2025

Podium finish for Mirka!

In a multi-stage process, Mirka Henninger was shortlisted for the Teaching Excellence Award 2025 in the "Strong Foundations" category. We would like to thank everyone involved for the honor and are delighted that the courses are appreciated by the students. This appreciation is a wonderful confirmation for us and at the same time an incentive to continue to promote our teaching in a committed and well-founded manner! Click on the news tile for more impressions of the award ceremony.

30. April 2025: ESM meeting

Exchange on experience sampling methods

On April 30, our meeting on experience sampling methods took place, at which Timon Elmer (Applied Social and Health Psychology, UZH), Lara Wolfers (Digital Lives), Ines Mürner-Lavanchy (Youth Mental Health), Rosa Lavelle-Hill (Digital Humanities and AI), Sarah Koch (Applied Exercise Physiology) and Mirka Henninger gave insights into their research projects. Among other things, they discussed the recording of everyday behavior and emotions, the further development of measurement methods, the use of digital technologies such as wearables and the linking of psychological and physiological data in everyday research. We were delighted with the exciting exchange about ESM studies and are already looking forward to the next ESM meeting.

March 2025: Visit from Landau!

Dominik researches the psychometric properties of slider scales.

Dominik is a PhD student at the RPTU in Landau and part of Tanja Lischetzke's research group. In his research, he focuses on slider scales (or visual analog scales) in different contexts. Among other things, he investigates the psychometric properties of slider and Likert scales in ambulatory assessment studies, for example in terms of measurement invariance and reliability.in March, he visited the Department of Statistics and Data Science, where he worked with Mirka Henninger on a model for capturing response styles in slider scales.

March 12-14, 2025: Research meeting

The SDS team in Günsberg, Solothurn

The SDS team spent three days at the research meeting in idyllic Günsberg near Solothurn. We enjoyed a series of interesting presentations, for example from Dr. Judith Rode, who gave us an insight into the coordination of research and clinical practice. There were also heated discussions on how to deal with p-values in psychological research and the sense and nonsense of post-hoc power analyses. At least as heated were (some of) the dinner preperations in the cooking teams, which nevertheless ended in a complete success! On Thursday evening, Linus, part-time game master, was allowed to give free rein to his creativity at the joint game evening, which we will remember for a long time to come. We rounded off our stay with a short hike to the "Hofbergli" mountain restaurant, organized by our hiking guide Jan.

February 20-14, 2025: Winter School Fribourg

Visual emotion recognition using AI: Linus, Jan and Constantin develop new app!

Bienvenue à Fribourg! Constantin, Linus and Jan spent a week at the winter school of the University of Fribourg, which focused on the subjects of data analytics and machine learning. During this week, they received an introduction to the Python programming language for data analysis and the use of machine learning. At the end, they learned about the infinite possibilities of deep learning with neural networks and worked with non-tabular data such as images and text. They became developers of their own app, which can be used to recognize emotions based on facial expressions. If a book is ever written about the great AI developers Constantin, Linus and Jan, this will be the week the story began.

December 17, 2024: Year-end gathering

Year-end gathering of the SDS center

Today, we look back on the first year of the SDS and celebrate with our team, surrounded by countless mezze platters. It has been a year of settling in, getting to know each other and taking off. The autumn semester saw the start of the team's teaching activities and various research projects in the field of machine learning. At the same time, we had the pleasure of welcoming many researchers as guests.
We are excited about the challenges and opportunities that the coming year holds for our SDS team.

December, 2024: Nomination as Lecturer of the Year

Thank you!

The FG Psychologie and the students have nominated Mirka Henninger as "Lecturer of the Year 2024" for the lecture "Forschungsmethoden & Statistik I". We would like to thank you very much for the nomination and are delighted that the lecture is so appreciated by the students! We wish all students a relaxing semester vacation and look forward to a continuation in the spring semester 2025!

November, 2024: Visit from Leuven!

Jordan researches machine learning in ESM studies.

Jordan is a PhD student at KU Leuven under the supervision of Eva Ceulemans and Ginette Lafit. His research focuses on longitudinal models and data, particularly in Experience Sampling Methods (ESM), where he develops methods for sample size planning, data preprocessing, and quality assessments. Additionally, he investigates how ESM characteristics (e.g., designs, missing data patterns) influence model performance. This November, he is visiting Mirka Henninger's group to explore machine learning and interpretable methods for ESM studies.

October 3, 2024: Inaugural lecture

"From sumscore to machine learning... and back?"

On October 3, 2024, Mirka's inaugural lecture titled "From Sumscore to Machine Learning... and Back" took place at the Alte Universität. During the lecture, the faculty and guests were taken on a journey through time, from the sumscore to modern time series data analysis.

We are very pleased that so many people are interested in our research and sincerely thank you for coming! more

September 16-19, 2024: DGPs Conference in Vienna

Jan, Linus, Constantin and Mirka attend the DGPs conference.

In September, Linus, Jan and Mirka presented their researches as posters at the DGPs conference. Linus presented his master's thesis on the subject of decision trees for multilevel data, Jan his internship project on effect sizes in model-based recursive partitioning methods and Mirka her researches on local interpretation techniques for machine learning models. We are looking forward to many exciting discussions and a good time in Vienna - despite all the rain!

September 1, 2024: Welcome Constantin!

Constantin enriches our SDS team as a PhD student.

Constantin has a bachelor's and master's degree in psychology and is now pursuing his doctorate here. During his studies, he has gained some experience with simulation studies, for example on factor analysis with EEG data, variable selection with L1 regression or stability assessment of decision trees. His research interests lie in particular in machine learning methods and longitudinal data. Constantin will supervise final theses in the bachelor's program and hold seminars in the master's program, thus contributing to teaching activities.

September 1, 2024: Welcome (back) Jan!

Jan remains part of our SDS team as a PhD student.

After his research internship in our department this year and a short summer break, Jan is now returning to the SDS team as a PhD student. In his doctoral studies, he is working on the subject of study programs for machine learning methods. In addition, he will be supervising bachelor's theses and supporting the team in teaching activities from this semester onwards.

September 1, 2024: Welcome Linus!

Linus starts as a PhD student at our Center for Statistics & Data Science.

Linus studied psychology at the University of Zurich. He wrote his master's thesis at the Chair of Psychological Methodology, in which he investigated how hierarchical data can be integrated into machine learning methods. His research interests lie in particular in machine learning methods and hierarchical data.

September 1, 2024: Welcome Sabine!

Sabine supports the SDS team as a student assistant.

Sabine is currently completing her bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Basel. During her studies, she discovered her fascination for statistics in general and - as part of her bachelor's thesis - for data simulation in particular. In a previous life, she worked as an author and literary translator from Norwegian.

July 1, 2024: Welcome Sandro!

Sandro joins our SDS Team as a student assistant.

Sandro completed his bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Basel and is currently studying clinical psychology and neuroscience for his master's degree, also at the University of Basel. He has already gathered his first teaching experience by tutoring statistics. Sandro will support our teaching activities by creating and supervising exercises for the lectures, conducting literature research for our ongoing studies and taking on organizational tasks.

June 15, 2024: Welcome Luana!

Luana joins our SDS team as a research intern.

My name is Luana Brunelli and I am currently studying for my Master's degree in Psychology at the University of Zurich and have developed a great interest in statistics during my studies. In my internship I will investigate the reliability of intensive longitudinal data, also known as Ecological Momentary Assessments. This type of data analysis offers exciting insights into the temporal dynamics of behavior and experience patterns. I am looking forward to further deepening my knowledge and skills in this challenging and fascinating field of research.

June 1, 2024: Welcome Mirjam!

Mirjam starts as a scientific associate in the Center for Statistics & Data Science.

Mirjam is a mathematician by training with experience in data analysis in a range of topics (rabies transmission, antimicrobial resistance, clinical trials). Mirjam will be contributing to the teaching activities of the group by offering lectures and seminars on statistics in the Bachelor's and Master program. She will join the group part-time while continuing her work as a high school teacher.

April 17-19, 2024: Visit by Marie-Ann Sengewald & Carolin Strobl

Project work at the intersection of psychometrics and machine learning.

Together with Carolin Strobl (University of Zurich) and Marie-Ann Sengwald (Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories, Bamberg, Germany), we are working on integrating an effect size measures for differential item/step functioning into a machine learning method. We were happy to welcome both collaborators in Basel to discuss the research project and future work!

March 25-26, 2024: SDS at the Applied Machine Learning Days at EPFL Lausanne

Jan & Mirka visited the Applied Machine Learning Days.

How will machine learning and artificial intelligence change how we live, work, and interact with each other? Which strategies are used to develop new algorithms? And how can we train data engineers so that these developments are responsible and sustainable?
We were very happy to have had the opportunity to learn more about these topics - among others by Aleksander Madry from OpenAI - at the AMLD in Lausanne over the past few days.

February 15, 2024: Welcome Jan!

We are happy to welcome Jan as a new member of our SDS team.

Jan graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Fribourg. At the moment, he is studying psychology in the master's program at the University of Zurich. He already completed his master thesis at the chair of psychological methodology in which he evaluated statistical methods for assessing test fairness. During his research internship, Jan will contribute to a research project at the intersection of psychometrics and machine learning. His primary focus until June will be to conduct simulation studies to assess the effectiveness of a psychometric effect size in a machine learning method.

February 1, 2024: Start of the Center for Statistics & Data Science

From February 1, Mirka Henninger starts as the new professor for Statistics and Data Science.

Mirka studied psychology at the University of Mannheim and the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich, and received her doctorate from the University of Mannheim in 2019. Starting 2020, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher and from 2023 onward as a senior researcher for psychological methods at the Department of Psychology of the University of Zurich.

The research focus of the new Center is the development and assessment of psychometric models, machine learning methods, and multilevel modeling approaches and to test their applicability in psychological research.