Congratulations August 2007 Graduates!
08-15-2007
The Department of Statistics would like to congratulate all of its August 2007 graduates. On August 4, 2007, Purdue University and the Department of Statistics awarded degrees to the following people:
Ph.D. Graduates (Advisor) Dissertation Title
- Mr. Hui Xu - (Herman Rubin) "Some Applications of the Prior Bayes Approach"
- Ms. Huiping Xu (Bruce A. Craig) "Estimation of a General Correlation Structure for Latent Class and Latent Variable Models of Multivariate Binary Data"
- Mr. Benjamin Fanson
- Mr. Zhenyin Li
- Ms. Kyung-Mi Park
- Mr. Shuangcai Wang
- No Graduate Certificates were awarded in August 2007.
- Mr. Neil Gupta
- Ms. Meepa Kim
- Mr. Matthew James Spangle
- Mr. Neil Gupta
So far for the year 2007, the Department of Statistics has graduated 5 Ph.D. students, 21 M.S. students, 1 Graduate Certificate student, 37 Undergraduate Statistics students and 26 Actuarial Science students.
We would like to highlight the achievements of one of the Department's August 2007 graduates, Hui Xu. Hui Xu received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Herman Rubin.
Hui Xu's thesis, "Some Applications of the Prior Bayes Approach," considers robust estimators for a class of problems in which the prior is only restricted to be in a large class. These high-dimensional problems are not that unusual. Most of the thesis is devoted to the estimation of an infinite-dimensional normal mean, and the results here, under the only assumption that the prior mean squares of the coefficients are decreasing, are asymptotically close to what one can do using linear methods using the prior mean squares. The same methods are also used under similar conditions to get similar results for spectral density estimation. In this case, the prior distribution seems impossible to specify, although the condition of decreasing prior mean squares seems reasonable.
The estimators compare well with anything else, and the robustness properties even extend slightly. There is also a brief discussion of spectral density estimation under similar circumstances using multidimensional arguments, such as occur in spatial statistics or space-time spectra.
Hui Xu will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and Computer Networking at St. Cloud State Unversity in St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Best wishes to all of our graduates. We look forward to hearing from you!