Welcome | Department of Statistics

The Department of Statistics at Yale University consists of 8 faculty members, 3 staff, and 28 graduate students. We offer M.A. and Ph.D. programs, as well as an undergraduate major in Statistics.

We have active research programs in statistical information theory, statistical genetics and bioinformatics, bayesian methods, statistical computing, graphical methods, model selection, asymptotics, and other topics. Our faculty and students are also active in collaborative research with other departments throughout the university, including computer science, biological sciences, social sciences, physical sciences, engineering, bioinformatics, economics and applied mathematics.

We occupy the James Dwight Dana House, which is listed as a National Historic Landmark and carries the Landmark Plaque of the New Haven Preservation Trust. In addition to office and classroom spaces, the Dana House is home to a computing laboratory for use by our faculty and students.

Seminars

April 25, 2016, 4:15pm
Ryan Tibshirani
Carnegie Mellon University
Recent Advances in Trend Filtering
I will discuss trend filtering, a newly proposed tool of Steidl et al. (2006), Kim et al. (2009) for nonparametric regression. The trend filtering estimate is defined as the minimizer of a penalized least squares criterion, in which the penalty term sums the absolute kth order discrete derivatives...

May 2, 2016, 4:15pm
Yuchen Zhang
University of California, Berkeley
Provable algorithms for learning neural networks
Neural networks have been widely used in machine learning and artificial intelligence, but the theoretical understanding of neural network learning has lagged its practical successes. In this talk, we study several provable algorithms for learning multi-layer and fully connected neural networks for...