Four fifth-year doctoral students in statistics (STAT) at Rice have won in the 2024 student paper competition of the American Statistical Association.
Zeijian Liu, Thomas Sun, Shengbin Ye and John Zito will receive travel funding to present their papers at the ASA’s Joint Statistical Meeting in Portland, Ore., Aug. 3-8.
Liu’s paper, “Optimal plug-in Gaussian processes for modelling derivatives,” was co-written with his adviser, Meng Li, Noah Harding Assistant Professor of STAT. He won in the ASA’s Section on Bayesian Statistical Science, and earned his B.S. in mathematics from Tsinghua University, China, in 2019.
Sun’s paper, “Ultra-efficient MCMC for Bayesian longitudinal functional data analysis,” was co-written with his adviser, Daniel Kowal, Dobelman Family Assistant Professor of STAT. He won in the ASA’s Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics Sections, and earned his B.A. in STAT and economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017.
Ye’s paper, “Operator-induced structural variable selection for identifying materials genes,” was co-written with his adviser Meng Li, and Thomas Senftle, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. He won in the ASA’s Physical and Engineering Sciences, and Quality and Productivity Sections, and earned his B.S. in probability and statistics from University of California, San Diego, in 2019.
Zito’s paper, “The projected dynamic linear model for time series on the sphere,” was co-written with Kowal, his adviser. He won in ASA’s Business and Economic Statistics Section and earned his B.A. in mathematics from Kenyon College in 2016.