Mattia Stival

Researcher (RTD-A) at the Department of Economics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

I am currently working as a statistician on the Planet4Health project, collaborating with the Venetian research team under the supervision of Stefano Campostrini and Gaia Bertarelli. My research interests primarily involve the development of statistical models for the analysis of complex data, with a particular focus on time series data and Bayesian methods for social and environmental sciences.

Prior to my work on the Planet4Health project, I served as a post-doctoral researcher at Ca' Foscari University, contributing to the Age-it project for about a year. In this role, I developed statistical models and methods to study multi-morbidity dynamics in Italy.

I got my Ph.D. from the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Padova in May 2022. My dissertation, supervised by M. Bernardi and P. Dellaportas, was titled "Sports Performance Analysis with State Space Models". I keep this research theme active by collaborating with experts in the field of sports science.

You can find my CV here.

Timeline

[June 2024-Now]

Researcher (rtd-a) (SECS-S/05) under the supervision of Prof. S Campostrini and G. Bertarelli.

Where: Department of Economics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

Project: Planet4Health. Translating Science into Policy. A Multisectoral Approach to Adaptation & Mitigation of Adverse Effects of Vector-Borne Diseases, Environmental Pollution and Climate Change on Planetary Health.

[Mar. 2023-June 2024]

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (SECS-S/05) under the supervision of Prof. S Campostrini.

Where: Department of Economics, Ca' Foscari University of Venice.

Project: Age-it. Spoke 10. Theoretical and data-driven study of the dynamic and mechanisms generating sub-population health-inequalities in longevity and healthy ageing.

[Feb. 2022-Feb. 2023]

Postdoctoral Research Fellow (SECS-S/01) under the supervision of Prof. M. Cattelan.

Where: Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Padova.

Project: Changepoint detection in sequences of multivariate time series with application to personal healthcare monitoring.

[Oct. 2018-Dec. 2021]

PhD student under the supervision of Prof. M. Bernardi and P. Dellaportas.

Where: Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Padova.

Dissertion title: Sports performance analysis with state space models (discussed: 04/05/2022).

Main publications

Methods

Stival M., Schiavon L., Campostrini S. (2024). A Bayesian approach to uncover local and temporal determinants of heterogeneity in repeated cross-sectional health surveys. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society). https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae138 The poster based on this work won "Best Poster Award" at ISBA2024 in Venice.
Stival M., Bernardi M., Cattelan M., Dellaportas P. (2023). Missing data patterns in runners' careers: do they matter? Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics) https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssc/qlad009.
Stival M., Bernardi M., Dellaportas P. (2023). Doubly-online changepoint detection for monitoring health status during sports activities. Annals of Applied Statistics doi.org/10.1214/22-AOAS1724. Research Prize 2022 winner for independent researchers (non-strutturati) of the Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Padova (2000 €).

Applications

Brustio P.R., Stival M., Boccia G. (2023). Relative age effect reversal on the junior-to-senior transition in world-class athletics. Journal of Sports Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2023.2245647
Boccia G., Brustio P.R., Stival M. et al. (2024). Performance pathways in elite middle- and long-distance track and field athletes: the influence of a successful youth. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport. doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2024.05.007

Working papers and arxiv

Schiavon L., Stival M. (2024) A multiscale Bayesian nonparametric framework for partial hierarchical clustering. Short paper in Arxiv here.
Stival M., Schiavon L., Bertarelli G., Campostrini S. (2025) Communicating Complex Statistical Models to a Public Health Audience: Translating Science into Action with the FARSI Approach. Available at arxiv.org/pdf/2504.06787.
Stival M., Andreella A., Bertarelli G., Midões C., Tonellato S.F., De Cian E., Campostrini S. (2025). The Perceived Influences of Environment on Health in Italy: a Penalized Ordinal Regression Approach. Available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01803

PhD thesis

Stival M. (2022). Sports performance analysis with state space models. PhD thesis. In 2023, the thesis received an honorable mention (menzione di merito) at the award ceremony for the best doctoral dissertation in Applied Statistics of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS).

Conference proceedings, posters, slides, etc.

Discussions

Stival M., Schiavon L. (2023). Mattia Stival and Lorenzo Schiavon’s contribution to the Discussion of “Flexible marked spatio-temporal point processes with applications to event sequences from association football” by Narayanan, Kosmidis and Dellaportas, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssc/qlad068.

Conference proceedings

Stival, M. (2025). Measuring Discipline Imbalance in Decathlon and Heptathlon Scoring Systems. In: di Bella, E., Gioia, V., Lagazio, C., Zaccarin, S. (eds) Statistics for Innovation I. SIS 2025. Italian Statistical Society Series on Advances in Statistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-96736-8_67.
Stival, M., Schiavon, L., Bertarelli, G., Campostrini, S. (2024). Exploring disease prevalence in Italy: a web application utilizing sample-based predictions from a Bayesian spatio-temporal model with external validation. In: Methodological and Applied Statistics and Demography IV - SIS 2024, Short Papers, Contributed Sessions 2, Springer, Convegno: SIS 2024.
Schiavon L., Stival, M. (2024). Efficient posterior inference for spatio-temporal modelling of repeated cross-sectional data. In: Methodological and Applied Statistics and Demography II - SIS 2024, Short Papers, Solicited Sessions, Springer, Convegno: SIS 2024 (ISBN 9783031643507).
Stival M., Bernardi M., Cattelan M., Dellaportas P. (2022). Longitudinal clustering of athletes’ careers under informative missing data patterns. In: Proceedings of the 36-th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling.
Stival M., Bernardi M., Cattelan M., Dellaportas P. (2022). Double clustering with a matrix-variate regression model: finding groups of athletes and disciplines in decathlon’s data. In: Book of Short Papers SIS 2022.
Stival M., Volpe A., Bidogia L. (2022). BASAS: a graphical tool to investigate variability, repeatability and asymmetries in Squat. In: Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the International Sports Engineering Association (ISEA2022).
Stival M. (2021). A dynamic matrix-variate model for clustering time series with multiple sources of variation. In: Book of Short Papers SIS 2021.
Stival M., Bernardi M. (2020). Dynamic Bayesian clustering of sport activities. In: Proceedings of the 35 th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling.
Stival M., Bernardi M. (2019). Dynamic Bayesian clustering of running activities. In: Smart Statistics for Smart Applications (SIS 2019).

Posters (selected)

Stival M., Bernardi M., Dellaportas P. (2022). Doubly-online changepoint detection for monitoring health status during sports activities. 800 years UNIPD.
Stival M., Bernardi M., Cattelan M., Dellaportas P. (2022). Missing data patterns in runners' careers: do they matter? Greeks Stochastics, Corfù.
Three posters developed under the Age-it project ( ISBA 2024, SIS 2024, Lorenzo Bernardi 2024 ).

Slides (selected)

Stival M. (2024). Joining Bayesian models to identify groups of occupations with different risk behaviors in Italy. CMStatistics 2024, London. A joint work with A. Andreella, L. Schiavon and S. Campostrini. Conference. Slides.
Stival M. (2024). A Bayesian approach to uncover spatio-temporal determinants of heterogeneity in repeated cross-sectional health surveys. Greek Stochastics ξ' - Statistics in Health. Slides.
Stival M. (2023). Missing data patterns in runners' careers: do they matter? SAW 2023. Slides

NEWS

19-21 February 2025: I will be in Pescara for DSSR 2025, where I will present the work "The environment around us: statistical insights into community perceptions using PASSI data" at the invited session "Environmental attitudes, behaviors, and awareness in Italy".

February - March 2025: I will teach "R CODING AND FINANCE ANALYTICS (6 cfu) [EM2099]".

24/12/2024 The paper "A Bayesian approach to uncover local and temporal determinants of heterogeneity in repeated cross-sectional health surveys" written with L. Schiavon and S. Campostrini is out: https://doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnae138 !:)

04/07/2024 I won the "Best Poster Award" at ISBA 2024! :) Here you can have a look at it!

15/06/2024 I became rtd-a!!:)

Links

Write me at: mattia.stival[at]unive.it