Harvard University Department of Statistics

06/06/2025

"What is intelligence?" and "How do we ensure safe human-computer interaction?" Register for Xiao-Li Meng and Julie Vu's Harvard Online Summer Course "Data Science: An Artificial Ecosystem" by June 17th to explore data & AI topics from different perspectives:

Ever wondered what Harvard Summer School courses are like? Check out this sneak peek into just a few of the 200+ courses offered to high school students.

06/05/2025

In "If statistics Must Die... Let It Go Out with All Its Styles" (in the June 2025 Institute of Mathematical Statistics Bulletin) Professor Xiao-Li Meng proposes that statisticians embrace both traditional and newer styles to lead the profession forward. Read more here:

10/29/2024

We’re excited to announce that Preceptor Julie Vu will speak with the Harvard College Women’s Center on Wednesday, October 30th at 7 PM in Canaday Hall B (Lower Level)! Join us for an inspiring discussion on navigating identities in academic and professional spaces, female representation in STEM, and gender equity. Scan the QR code and save the date!

10/04/2024

Congrats t to Statistics PhD alum Louis Cammarata on receiving the 2025 Lawrence D. Brown PhD Student Award! 🏆 Cammarata was selected based on his work on dynamic network analysis with Prof. Tracy Ke: https://statistics.fas.harvard.edu/news/louis-cammarata-receives-2025-lawrence-d-brown-phd-student-award-0

09/23/2024

🎉 Congratulations to Prof. Susan Murphy on receiving the 2024 Mosteller Statistician of the Year Award! 🏆✨ We celebrated her achievements with students, postdocs, and colleagues at a special BCASA reception. Read more in the BCASA's newsletter: https://sway.cloud.microsoft/kHlKB41elOp5CxoK?ref=Link

09/10/2024

Hosted by Harvard Stats, CS & Applied Math, our Women in Tech & AI Career Panel featured Stella Biderman, Executive Director of Eleuther AI, & Ashley Mae Conard, Sr. Researcher at Microsoft Research Health Futures. What an empowering event! https://statistics.fas.harvard.edu/news/statistics-department-hosts-women-tech-and-ai-career-panel

09/05/2024

Read “HEDE: Heritability estimation in high dimensions by Ensembling Debiased Estimators" by Yanke Song, Xihong Lin, and Pragya Sur. They develop a new method for estimating heritability or signal-to-noise ratio in challenging high-dimensional scenarios, with applications to statistical genetics:

Estimating heritability remains a significant challenge in statistical genetics. Diverse approaches have emerged over the years that are broadly categorized as either random effects or fixed effects heritability methods. In this work, we focus on the latter. We propose HEDE, an ensemble approach to....

08/29/2024

Congrats to Kevin Luo, Yufan Li, and Pragya Sur on their paper “ROTI-GCV: Generalized Cross-Validation for right-ROTationally Invariant Data." They introduce ROTI-GCV, a new framework for cross-validation under sample dependence and heavy-tailed covariates:

Two key tasks in high-dimensional regularized regression are tuning the regularization strength for good predictions and estimating the out-of-sample risk. It is known that the standard approach -- $k$-fold cross-validation -- is inconsistent in modern high-dimensional settings. While leave-one-out....

08/28/2024

Tune into the Stats and Stories podcast to explore how Bayesian methods are impacting the environmental landscape. The podcast features Noel Cressie, Distinguished Professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and Director of its Centre for Environmental Informatics:

Would you be surprised if a wombat won a statistical achievement award? well our guest Noel Cressie is here to talk about the WOllongong Methodology for Bayesian Assimilation of Trace-gases and how it can impact the environmental landscape.

08/27/2024

To all literature & stats fans, how similar is stats analysis to close readings? Take a look at responses in Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog by Stats PhD Alum Prof. Andrew Gelman: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/08/14/close-reading-in-literary-criticism-and-statistical-analysis/.

Close reading in literary criticism and statistical analysis Posted on August 14, 2024 9:14 AM by Andrew I happened to come across this comment from Jrc a few years back: A lot of your posts about journalism and writing are almost like literary criticism – close reading for context, picking out pa...

08/26/2024

For the last meeting, our Data & Society Book Club enjoyed the outdoors while discussing The Harvard Data Science Review's Special Issue 5 "Future Shock: Grappling With the Generative AI Revolution." Sponsored by the Stats Department, the book club was co-led by Julie Vu and Emily Palmer and included participants from across the Harvard campus. During this last meeting, we shared our insights and reactions to problems associated with GenAI - thanks for a lively discussion!

08/23/2024

Thank you, Harvard Data Science Review, for your insightful article on "Is Chat GPT More Biased Than You?" The article examines the bias in LLMs and explores how to reduce this bias. Read more here:

AI is changing the world in ways that are difficult to forecast, but the impact will surely be enormous. Large language models (LLMs) are the most recent AI system that has captured the public eye. The rise of AI and LLMs offers efficiency and assistance, but raises questions of job loss, fairness,....