Three separate statistics articles by BYU professors recently won paper-of-the-year awards from three academic journals.
The paper “A model for Antarctic surface mass balance and ice core site selection,” authored by Phil White, Shane Reese and William Christensen, was named the 2019 Best Paper for the journal Environmetrics. This paper began as White's master’s thesis while working under the direction of Reese and Christensen.
The Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics named Matthew Heaton’s paper titled “A case study competition among methods for analyzing large spatial data” as one of its top two papers for 2018–19. In the paper, Heaton illustrated how new data instruments provide high resolution and high frequency data, and new statistical methods are being developed for modeling the underlying structure and measuring the uncertainty. Heaton challenged the authors of competing methods for using large spatial data to a "bake-off" under comparable computing environments.
Another BYU statistics professor, Garritt Page, received the Lindley Prize from the journal Bayesian Analysis. The prize recognizes the impact and importance of his work on the foundations, theory and application of Bayesian statistics. He was a coauthor of the winning paper, “On the geometry of Bayesian inference.”
“We strive to publish in the top-tier statistics journals,” said Scott Grimshaw, the statistics department chair. “I'm happy to see these faculty who are working on some of the most challenging applications of the big data era receive recognition from their peers.”
All three papers had non-BYU co-authors contribute as well.
