This conference is the sixth in the series of decennial conferences at Concordia University starting in 1971. The conference Statistics 1971 Canada was organized by the Montreal Chapter of the American Statistical Association, Prof. T. D. Dwivedi (Concordia University) being one of the organizers. The success of the conference “Statistics 1971 Canada” was instrumental in the creation of the Statistical Society of Canada (see the article by David R. Bellhouse and Christian Genest entitled “A History of the Statistical Society of Canada: The Formative Years” in Statistical Science,1999, Vol. 14, No. 1, 80–125). Professor T.D. Dwivedi had been very much a part of these conferences until he retired in 1997. In 2001, the organizers held a special session on Econometrics in his honour and presented a plaque recognizing his contributions to Statistics. He could not be with us for the Statistics 2011 Canada conference as he passed away in December 2008. At this conference Professor Jean-Marie Dufour, a scholar of international repute currently holding a William Dow Chair in Political Economy at McGill University presented a plenary lecture in his honour. A plenary lecture in memory of Professor Dwivedi is featured in Statistics 2021 Canada conference as well.

The basic goal of the decennial conferences at Concordia has been to provide a forum for Canadian statisticians to assess the existing techniques and discuss new directions in Applied Statistics. As such in this conference, in addition to the traditional theoretical/applied areas, interdisciplinary research would be encouraged and promoted including major theme areas Actuarial Science, Applied Statistics, Big Data, Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Computational Statistics, Data Mining, Data Science, Demography, Econometrics, Health Statistics, Model Selection and Validation, Social Statistics, Supply Chain, Survival Analysis, Stochastic Methods in Ecology, Finance and Engineering.

The conference will feature plenary lectures, invited sessions, contributed sessions, and poster presentations. The presentations are dedicated to all areas of statistical sciences, in general. In particular, some invited talks in the area of Actuarial Science will be featured prominently, in honour of Professor Jose Garrido, on his retirement from Concordia University.