Purdue Statistics professors awarded NSF Grant
04-17-2025
Antik Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of Statistics (PI) and Anindya Bhadra, Professor of Statistics (Co-PI), have been awarded a three-year NSF grant, totaling $375,000, for their research on probabilistic graphical models with applications to social sciences. The award, titled: “Likelihood-based Inference for Exponential Family Graphical Models,” has been funded by the Social and Economic Sciences (SES) division of the NSF under the Methodology, Measurement and Statistics (MMS) program for three years.
Exponential family probabilistic graphical models are useful for modeling complex dependencies between multiple variables. The partially observed version of these models allows departure from the exponential family via a “product of experts” model to capture more complex dependence, most notably via Boltzmann Machine-based architectures, and forms a key tool for generative AI. Unfortunately, these models often contain an intractable normalizing constant that makes likelihood-based (both maximum likelihood and fully Bayesian) inference challenging. The project will address this key barrier. Additionally, the newly developed methods will be applied to study psychometric datasets.
About the Department of Statistics at Purdue University
Our mission is to advance the frontiers of statistical sciences and data science in both theory and applications; to provide learning environments that produce well-educated data scientists, statisticians, probabilists, and quantitatively literate people; and to join with others in bringing the strengths of the statistical sciences to address societal needs. The Department offers the degrees of Bachelor of Science, Graduate Certificate, Master of Science, Online Master of Applied Statistics, and Ph.D. in Statistics. Our programs prepare students for careers in both industry and academia and prepare them to be leaders in their fields. The Department of Statistics is part of the College of Science at Purdue University and is housed in the Mathematical Sciences Building in West Lafayette, Indiana. Learn more about the department at stat.purdue.edu.