Scientific program

 

25 August 2026

19.00-20.00     Preregistration

 

26 August 2026

15.15-16.15     Registration

16.15-16.30     Opening

16.30-17.55     Talk Session 1
Advances in model-based clustering
Chair:   TBA

  • Alessio Farcomeni (University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy), Rosario Barone, Francesco Bartolucci, Silvia Pandolfi
    Multilayer Dynamic Stochastic Block Models for Analysing International Arms Trade Patterns
  • Giuseppe Mignemi (Kore University, Italy), Daniele Tancini, Francesco Bartolucci
    Extended Infinite Hidden Markov Models
  • Jason Pillay (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Andriette Bekker, Cristina Tortora, Antonio Punzo
    Likelihood-based inference for censored compositional data

 

17.55-18.20   Lightning Talk Session 1
Chair:   TBA

  • Silvia D'Elia (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Valeria Paggi, Marco Alfò, Maria Brigida Ferraro
    Functional Data Analysis and Fuzzy Clustering of Longitudinal Thyroglobulin Trajectories After Thyroid Cancer Treatment
  • Silvia Dallari, Edoardo Redivo (University of Bologna, Italy), Cinzia Viroli
    A Latent Editing Mixture Model for DNA Sequence Clustering
  • Andrea Bonomo (University of Pavia, Italy), Domenico Giosa, Silvia Figini, Elena Ballante
    Characterization of the Italian Gut Microbiota through Shotgun Metagenomics and Biclustering with the Iterative Signature Algori
  • Elisa Muratore (University of Trento, Italy), Riccardo Gallotti, Claudio Agostinelli
    Contrasting disinformation: A mixture of Hawkes Processes for the identification of coordinated inauthentic behaviour
  • Matteo Ventura (University of Calabria, Italy), Sabrina Giordano, Julien Jacques, Dimitris Karlis, Paola Zuccolotto
    Model-Based Clustering of Rating Data: Handling Complex Dependencies and Response Styles
  • Ockert van Heerden (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Andriëtte Bekker, Seite Makgai, Arnoldus Otto, Antonio Punzo
    A Contaminated Model for Overdispersed Multinomial Microbiome Count Data
  • Sofia Mangano (University of Catania, Italy), Salvatore Ingrassia
    A Contrastive Learning Approach for Prior Shift Correction

 

18.20-18.30     Break

 

18.30-19.30     Keynote Talk 1
Cellwise Robust Discriminant Analysis
Fabio Centofanti, Can Hakan Dagidir, Mia Hubert (KU Leuven, Belgium), Peter J. Rousseeuw
Chair: TBA

 

19.30-21.00     Welcome Cocktail

 

27 August 2026

08.30-09.55   Talk Session 2
Foundational approaches in clustering
Chair:  TBA

  • Vanessa Berenguer-Rico (University of Oxford, UK), Stefan Gudmundsson, Bent Nielsen
    k-means: asymptotics and cluster separation
  • Marco Loog (Radboud University, Netherlands)
    Badly Behaved Learning Curves: Nonmonotonicity in Clustering and Classification
  • Garritt L. Page (Brigham Young University, USA), Andrés F. Barrientos, David B. Dahl, David B. Dunson
    Uncertainty Quantification in Bayesian Clustering

 

09.55-10.55   Keynote Talk 2
The utility of latent variables in model-based clustering
Isobel Claire Gormley (University College Dublin, Ireland)
Chair: TBA

 

 

10.55-11.25   Coffee Break

 

11.25-12.50     Talk Session 3
Complex model-based clustering in action
Chair:   TBA

  • Volodymyr Melnykov (University of Alabama, USA), Salvatore Ingrassia, Lingge Wang
    Multisample mixture modeling with extensions
  • Andrea Cappozzo (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy), Luca Scrucca, Thomas Brendan Murphy
    MBC3: model-based clustering of MBC2 talks
  • Federico Castelletti (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy), Andrea Cappozzo, Vincenzo Roberto Sillitti
    Graphical model-based clustering of covariance matrices

 

12.50-13.15   Lightning Talk Session 2
Chair:   TBA

  • Igor Melnykov (University of Minnesota Duluth, USA)
    Model-Based Clustering of Time-Varying Compositional Data
  • Jing Li, Jeremy Baggs (University of Alabama, USA), Shuchismita Sarkar, Xuwen Zhu
    Multi-Label Classification of Text Data using a Mixture of the von Mises-Fisher Distribution
  • Sofia Salvatelli (University of Bologna and Joint Research Centre (JRC), Italy), Alessandro Sellerio, Carlo Ferigato, Domenico Perrotta
    Overlap in Mixture Models and Gini’s Transvariation: from spherical Gaussian to skewed distributions
  • Lucía Trapote Reglero (University of Valladolid, Spain), Luis Ángel García Escudero, Agustín Mayo Íscar
    A High-Dimensional Extension of TCLUST
  • Luca Fossaluzza (University of Genoa, Italy), Marta Nai Ruscone
    Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Mixture Model via Copula
  • Seitebaleng Makgai (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Samkelisiwe Ntshangase, Andriëtte Bekker
    Understanding Heavy Tailed data via the Logistic Scale Mixture Distribution

 

13.15-14.15   Lunch

 

14.15-15.15     Keynote Talk 3
Statistical Analysis of Synthetic Data Filtering for Fine-Tuning: A Linear Regression Framework
Heejune Sheen, Harrison Zhou (Yale University, USA)
Chair:   TBA

 

15.15-16.15     Data Challenge Paper Presentation
Chair:  Laura Anderlucci, Roberto Di Mari, Monia Ranalli

     

    16.15-16.45     Coffee Break

     

    16.45-18.10     Talk Session 4
    Dimensionality reduction in clustering
    Chair:  TBA

    • Johan Lyrvall (National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology - Inria, France), Christophe Biernacki, Christine Keribin, Emmanuel Chazard
      Levels Merging in the Latent Class Model
    • Monia Ranalli (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), Roberto Rocci
      Parsimonious factorial mixture model for simultaneous clustering and dimensionality reduction of three-way ordinal data
    • Silvia Dallari (University of Bologna, Italy), Laura Anderlucci, Angela Montanari
      Random Projections for High-Dimensional Clustering of Continuous and Count Data

     

    20.30   Workshop Dinner (meeting at 19.15, Piazza Verga)

     

    28 August 2026

    09.00-10.25    Talk Session 5
    Robust modeling and outlier detection
    Chair:   TBA

    • Elena Ballante (University of Pavia, Italy), Federico Maria Quetti, Andrea Bonomo, Paolo Giudici, Silvia Figini
      A Bagging-Based Approach to Explainable Clustering with Application to Single-Cell RNA-Seq Data
    • Cinzia Di Nuzzo, Matteo Farnè (University of Bologna, Italy)
      A simultaneous criterion to select latent rank, number of clusters and proportion of outliers
    • Andrea Cerioli (University of Parma, Italy), Luis Angel Garcia-Escudero, Agustin Mayo-Iscar, Lucía Trapote Reglero
      Robust model-based clustering and mixture modeling under heavy tails

     

    10.25-10.50   Lightning Talk Session 3
    Chair:   TBA

    • Andrea Sottosanti (University of Padova, Italy), Enrico Bovo, Pietro Belloni, Giovanna Boccuzzo
      Mapping Mortality Clusters in Multivariate Areal Data via Bayesian Mixtures with Shrinkage Priors
    • Yuri Calleo (Universitas Mercatorum, Italy), Simone Di Zio, Fabrizio Maturo
      Topological clustering in Delphi studies: A network-based approach to dimensionality reduction
    • Xinshu Yi, (University of Alabama, USA), Volodymyr Melnykov
      The Date of Somma-Vesuvius Eruption
    • Abderrahmane Moumene (University of Parma, Italy), Ziad Bnmati, Nour H. M. Alterri
      Unsupervised Inventory State Classification for Fresh Dairy Products Using Physics-Based Feature Engineering
    • Lucia Simmini (University of Salento, Italy), Antonella Congedi, Sandra De Iaco, Monica Palma
      A spatiotemporal GTWR approach for PM10 estimation
    • Anna Prusak (Krakow University of Economics, Poland), Marek Jabłoński, Dariusz Raś
      A multi-criteria framework for AI-maturity classification using TOPSIS-Sort method: evidence from a museum in Kraków
    • Hristo Tanev, Charles Macmillan, Francesca Torti (European Commission, Joint Research Center, Italy)
      Hierarchical Agri-Food Commodity Classification Using Sentence-BERT and LLMs

     

    10.50-11.20     Coffee Break

     

    11.20-12.20    Keynote Talk 4
    Clustering multivariate longitudinal data of mixed type
    Julien Jacques (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France), Francesco Amato
    Chair:   TBA

     

    12.20-12.45   Lightning Talk Session 4
    Chair:   TBA

    • Farah Naz (University of Pavia, Italy)
      A Graph-based Clustering Algorithm for Bridge Problem Solution using Density Peak Assignment through Optimized Shortest Path
    • Yana Melnykov (University of Alabama, USA), Jing Li
      On Transformation Discriminant Analysis
    • Lucia Filippozzi (University of Trento, Italy), Claudio Agostinelli, Sara Wade
      Bootstrap-based Variational AutoEncoders
    • Andre Kleynhans (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Frans Kanfer, Sollie Millard
      Mitigating the Impact of Non-Typical Observations: A Component Self-Paced Learning Approach
    • Rebecca Distratis (University of Salento, Italy), Claudia Cappello, Sandra De Iaco, Lucia Simmini
      A spatially-aware non-compensatory composite indicator of socio-economic gaps
    • Arno Otto (University of Pretoria, South Africa), Andriëtte Bekker, Antonio Punzo, Johan Ferreira, Cristina Tortora
      Contaminated Asymmetric Laplace Cluster-Weighted Models

     

    12.45-13.45   Lunch

     

    13.45-14.45     Keynote Talk 5
    Rethinking Robustness: The Cellwise Paradigm for Heterogeneous Data
    Francesca Greselin (University of Milano Bicocca, Italy)
    Chair:   TBA

     

    14.45-16.10     Talk Session 6
    New trends in clustering and classification
    Chair:  TBA

    • Lucia Filippozzi, Inigo Urteaga, Claudio Agostinelli (University of Trento, Italy)
      Bayesian Variable Selection in Generalized Linear Models
    • Claudio Conversano (University of Cagliari, Italy), Hengyi Ke, Sunil J. Rao
      Distorted Variable Analysis
    • Eduardo Cortes Gomez (University of Buffalo, USA), Jeffrey C. Miecznikowski
      A Gap Statistic Framework For Categorical Data Clustering and Testing

     

    16.10-16.40 Coffee Break

     

    16.40-18.05     Talk Session 7
    Soft clustering methods
    Chair:  TBA

    • Federico P. Cortese (University of Milan, Italy), Antonio Pievatolo, Elisa Maria Alessi
      Fuzzy jump models for soft and hard clustering of mixed-type multivariate time series
    • Fabrizio Di Mari (University of Calabria, Italy), Roberto Rocci, Stefano Antonio Gattone, Sabrina Giordano
      A Fuzzy Entropic Approach for Clustering Curves on a Reduced Subspace
    • Yana Melnykov, Volodymyr Melnykov, Marta Nai Ruscone (University of Genoa, Italy)
      On fuzzy classification indices and their variability assessment

     

    18:05-18.15    Closing

     

    Wine Session

    18.15-19.45     Wine tours in Sicily
    Chair: Mariella Ferrara (L’Archestrato, Catania, Italy)

    Wineries, wines and vine varieties:

    Agata Santangelo - Tenuta Stagliata

    • Cappuccio (Nerello Cappuccio, rosso)

     

    Al-Cantara

    • Aituzza (Nerello Mascalese, rosso, 2021)
    • Amuri di Fimmina e Amuri di Matri  (Nerello Mascalese, rosato)
    • Cappiddazzu Paga Tuttu (Cabernet Sauvignon, rosso, 2019)
    • Ciuri di Strata (Catarratto, bianco, 2024)
    • 'U Toccu (Pinot Nero, rosso, 2020)

     

    Fina

    • Firma del Tempo (Grillo, bianco, 2023)
    • Hanami (Merlot, rosato, 2025)
    • Perricone (Perricone, rosso, 2025)
    • Vola Vola (Viognier, bianco, 2025)

     

    Tenute Virone

    • Nero Sacro (Nero d'Avola, rosso)
    • Piumé (Catarratto, bianco)

     

    Last update:  17 June 2026.