Past Department Highlights – Department of Statistics

The Department of Statistics Celebrates its 50th Anniversary

This year the Colorado State University Department of Statistics is celebrating its 50^th anniversary. It is also the 60^th anniversary of its Ph.D. program and the Franklin A. Graybill Statistics and Data Science Laboratory (Stat Lab) – marking six decades of world-class education, research, service, and interdisciplinary support of the CSU community through powerful application of foundational science. Read full article here.

Zach Weller Helps to Publish Paper on Methane Leakage for EPA

Zach Weller, Assistant Professor in the Statistics Department, helped to publish a paper that estimates methane leakage from local natural gas distribution systems. The EPA has shown interest in potentially using the methodology to update its GHG inventory.

Ander Wilson an Author on the Best Environmental Epidemiology Paper Award

Ander Wilson, Assistant Professor in the Statistics department, was recently recognized as one of the authors of a paper which received the Best Environmental Epidemiology Paper Award. The paper is titled Acute Air Pollution Exposure and the Risk of Violent Behavior in the United States by Jesse D Berman, Jesse Burkhardt, Jude Bayham, Ellison Carter, and Ander Wilson. See the paper here (scroll down to the BEEP Award). Congratulations Ander!

Daniel Mork wins College Outstanding Scholar Award

Statistics PhD Student Daniel Mork won the College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Scholar Award. Dan was one of four awardees from the College of Natural Sciences at the 2020 Graduate Student Showcase. Daniel presented his research that focuses on developing new statistical methods to estimate how maternal exposures to environmental chemicals during pregnancy influence birth outcomes. This is joint work with his thesis advisor Ander Wilson.

New Course Development by Ben Prytherch

Statistic Department’s Ben Prytherch and Professor Matt Ross (Ecosystem Science and Sustainability) received a $20,000 Digital Learning Initiative grant from the Provost’s office to develop three 1-credit, online delivered, freely accessible R courses. The courses are currently being developed by Statistics students Alex Fout, Connor Gibbs, and Kathleen Wendt (PhD student in HDFS). The purpose is to serve students and faculty across the university who are teaching or taking classes that involve data analysis using R. They found that many instructors have been teaching R to their students as a component of their courses. This creates extra work for instructors and a steeper learning curve for students. These courses will allow faculty to direct their students to a high-quality set of training materials that will be accessible at any time, regardless of whether students are enrolled, and will free up time in their own classes to teach subject matter instead of teaching coding.

Grant Awarded to Andee Kaplan

The goal of this project is to develop a major methodological advancement in the Bayesian entity resolution literature with the extension of current work on streaming record linkage. The new work will allow for a data scenario where duplicates exist within a database (de-duplication) rather than being restricted to duplicates across databases (record linkage). We use recursive Bayes ideas to have near real time updates as more data becomes available (i.e., the streaming context).

Streaming Record Linkage for Online Data Deduplication (North Carolina State University Laboratory for Analytic Sciences). PI: Kaplan and Betancourt ($130,351.57; CSU: $90,623.57). Calendar Year 2021

Congratulations to our CNS Award Winners!

Congratulations to our very own Department of Statistics CNS Award winners! Faculty member Jana Anderson won the Faculty Excellence in Graduate Teaching and/or Mentoring Award. Ph.D. student Alex Fout won the Graduate Student Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and/or Mentoring Award.

Congratulations Jana and Alex!

Wen Zhou Elected as ISI Member

Wen Zhou has been elected as a Elected Member of the ISI (International Statistical Institute, https://www.isi-web.org/), one of the oldest community of statisticians since 1885, due to his significant contributions to high dimension data analysis, machine learning, bioinformatics and computational biology. ISI Elected membership is dedicated to those who are established in their careers and have made significant contributions to the statistical profession. Several faculty members in the Department of Statistics at CSU have already been elected as the Elected Member of the ISI. Much of Zhou’s work focuses on high-dimensional inference, multivariate time series and factor model, robust inference, and statistical machine learning, particularly with applications in statistical genomics, bioinformatics, quantitative linguistics, and econometrics. The problems of high-dimensional statistical inference have become acute with the explosion of high-throughput sequencing data: an example problem is determining differential expression of genes in a library of size 10,000 based on only a few replicate reads under each experimental condition. The model for each gene’s expression under each condition requires a set of parameters, so that the parametric dimension of the problem is huge and may exceed the sample size. Statistical approaches to these problems require novel methodological developments to handle the large scale, and new theoretical approaches to ensure essential properties like power to detect true discoveries and control on the rate of false discoveries. Zhou pays careful attention to developing these methods and theories under weak technical assumptions, so that the methods are valid under realistic conditions that are biologically relevant. He also ensures that his methods are computationally efficient and available to practitioners through easy-to-use software.

“‘Dr. Zhou has made significant contributions to the statistical profession through his research, teaching and services,” said Dr. Yehua Li, a professor of statistics at University of California, Riverside, “Dr. Zhou has proven himself as a valuable member of the international statistical society.”

Also, according to Dr. Jean Opsomer, an Elected Member of the ISI and the former head of the Department of Statistics at CSU, “Equally important, he is actively collaborating with researchers in biology and biochemistry who are performing genomics analyses, to ensure that they are using the state-of-the-art statistical methods in this rapidly evolving field and that their results are statistically valid.”

Congratulations Wen!

Statistics Department's Bailey Fosdick and Alex Fout Assist with Mitigation Surveillance of COVID-19 Spread

Colorado State University has a long history of investigating infectious disease outbreaks and is known for research exploring the complex interplay of pathogens, disease vectors, and the ecosystems in which transmissions occur. CSU is focused on the translation of those findings into practical solutions used by farmers, pet owners, and patients. Read more here.

Setting the Stage: Statistical Collaboration Training Videos

Training students in the art of effective statistical collaboration is essential for their applied statistics education. Challenging situations can arise in collaborations that are necessary to discuss before they occur. Julia Sharp (CSU Associate Professor), Emily Griffith (NCSU Research Associate Professor), and Megan Higgs (Critical Inference LLC and CSU Alumni), with help from Ann Hess (CSU Associate Professor), received support from the American Statistical Association Member Initiative program to create a set of 10 short videos illustrating challenging and salient topics of communication for training in statistical collaboration. Scenarios portrayed in the videos convey realistic statistical collaboration encounters. The 10 videos and accompanying materials can be used in training future statistical collaborators. The videos can be found here.

Ben Prytherch Starts CSU Statistics Book Club

Statistics Instructor and Advisor Ben Prytherch, has started the CSU Statistics Book Club! The club started in January 2019, they read and discuss interesting topics from the world of data analysis and statistics that might not be emphasized in a stats class. Their first book was Deborah Mayo’s “Statistical Inference as Severe Testing”. In fall 2019, the club read Alex Reinhart’s “Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide”. For spring 2020, they are reading Judea Pearl’s “The Book of Why”. The book club is open to anyone! If you have questions about the group, or if you want to join, send an email to ben.prytherch@colostate.edu. You can also learn more by checking out the CSU Statistics Book Club website, here. Happy reading!

Statistics Professor Honored for Expertise in Object - Oriented Data Analysis

Haonan Wang has been on the forefront of statistical analysis for nearly 20 years. He is well known in the statistics world for a variety of research areas, but his most innovative work is referred to as object-oriented data analysis. Read more…

SOGES Announces Sustainability Leadership Fellows

Lauren Hoskovec and Carrie Chennault from the CSU Statistics department were named SoGES sustainability leadership fellows. Congratulations Lauren and Carrie! Read more here.