Department of Statistics

Kick off the Autumn quarter and celebrate a return to campus with these can’t-miss recommendations from the College of Arts & Sciences.

Admitted students and families can engage with the College of Arts and Sciences through several department and program specific events over the next few weeks.

The formation of the Pacific Alliance for Low Income Inclusion in Statistics and Data Science (PALiISaDS) is a new partnership supported by a $5,000,000 investment from the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics  (SSTEM) Program.  The partnership is led by the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Washington, and also includes the University of California, Irvine, California State University Monterey Bay, California State University East Bay, California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo, and San Diego State University. 

A new study projects the number of days with "dangerous" and "extremely dangerous" mixtures of heat and humidity by the end of this century. Even if global warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius, results show that deadly heat waves will become much more common in the mid-latitudes, and many tropical regions will experience "dangerous" heat for about half the year.

Statistics professor Jon Wakefield led a team estimating excess deaths due to COVID. The findings caused a stir.

Researchers with the World Health Organization explain mistakes in high-profile mortality estimates for Germany and Sweden. The UW's Jon Wakefield, professor of statistics and of biostatistics, and Victoria Knutson, a doctoral student in biostatistics, are quoted.

Danni Lin (2011, 2013) finds her statistics and computational finance & risk management degrees helpful as a wine entrepreneur in the US and China. 

Through the Math Alliance, UW departments and programs provide mentoring and networking to encourage diversity in STEM fields.

"When Jeanne Calment of France died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days, she set a record for oldest human. That record still stands. As statisticians who study demography, we expect that record will be broken by 2100," write the UW's Michael Pearce, a doctoral student in statistics, and Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology.

Experts say so-called breakthrough cases remain rare, and deaths among vaccinated people are "effectively zero." Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology at the UW, is quoted.

New hires will join colleagues in the departments of Applied Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Psychology, and Statistics. 

As many as 60% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. have gone unreported, and the coronavirus has infected nearly 1 in 5 Americans, according to a new model out of the University of Washington. The UW's Nicholas Irons, a doctoral student in statistics, and Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology, are quoted.

Two UW scientists have developed a statistical approach to model how common COVID-19 is in the United States.

By early March 2021, roughly 65 million people in the U.S. — or one out of every five people — had been infected by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, a new analysis shows. The findings, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that roughly 60% of coronavirus infections had gone uncounted at that point — adding to a growing body of evidence that the pandemic’s true toll is far greater than official tallies show. Nicholas Irons, a doctoral student in statistics at the UW, is quoted.

The odds of living past age 110 are becoming more likely, according to a new study from the UW, which used mathematical modeling to predict the probability of people becoming “supercentenarians” in the years 2020 through 2100. Michael Pearce, a doctoral student in statistics at the UW, is quoted.