Welcome to Statistics and Actuarial Science

The Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science is a top-tier academic unit among statistical and actuarial science globally. Our community is engaged in topics such as actuarial science, biostatistics, data science, quantitative finance, statistics, & statistics-computing. Our department is home to more than 60 full-time faculty researching diverse and exciting areas, over 1000 undergraduate students from around the world, and more than 175 graduate students in master, doctoral, and professional programs.

News

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

2024 University Research Chairs named

Professor Mu Zhu has been named one of the 2024 University Research Chairs.

Mu's initial research interest was dimension reduction. In the early years of his faculty career, he devoted much attention to efficient kernel machines for rare target detection and ensemble methods for variable selection. He also worked on algorithms for making personalized recommendations, and applications of machine learning to healthcare informatics.

While ensemble learning continued to captivate his curiosity, in more recent years Mu has explored a hodgepodge of different topics—such as evaluation metrics, protein structures, transactional networks, and genetic epistasis. He also wrote a textbook for data science students. At present, he is studying various problems about dependence modeling, large covariance matrices, and generative neural networks.

His appointment was effective July 1, 2024.

Originally announced on the Daily Bulletin.

From April 26-28, teams of undergraduate student competed at the 2024 American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest hosted by the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science. Students worked around the clock with complex datasets assisted by graduate students, faculty and industry professionals to compete for prizes.

Congratulations to Cecilia Cotton and Jordan Hamilton, recipients of the 2024 Distinguished Teacher Awards from Waterloo’s Centre for Teaching Excellence. Since 1975, the award has been given annually to four exemplary instructors from across the university who have a “record of excellent teaching over an extended period at Waterloo, usually at least five years.”

Read the full article on the Faculty of Mathematics website.

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