Ph.D. Presentations

Verbal autopsy (VA) is a well developed tool to collect information describing deaths outside of hospitals by conducting surveys to the relatives and caregivers of the deceased person. It is routinely-implemented in low and middle income countries, where it often lacks sufficient resources to conduct the autopsy. The main task is to estimate both individual […]

Spatially dependent data are common in environmental and climate studies, where Gaussian process models are used for prediction and uncertainty quantification. Learning their covariance structure involves both statistical and computational challenges. Likelihood-based inference may be sensitive to covariance misspecification, while repeated evaluation of prediction-oriented criteria can be computationally demanding. To study these issues, we develop […]

Multivariate dependent discrete data routinely arise in microbiome studies. Analyzing these data presents interesting statistical challenges, such as high dimensionality, excess zeros, large heterogeneity across samples, and temporal dependence in […]