The empty drops you threw out in your single-cell RNA sequencing analysis might be hiding mysterious things 👀 check out our bioRxiv preprint! The empty drops do not contain cells. Yet we can still use them to learn interesting things about biology and technology. 1/

Tenure track job opportunity in our department! www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sta... #statistics

Are you interested in concentration inequalities? Curious about whether there is a middle ground between subexponential and subgaussian bounds? Want to know how this all interacts with exponential tilting? Then check out my new paper recently published in TMLR: openreview.net/forum?id=BQB...

Thoughts on peer review: willtownes.github.io/blog/2025/08...

We have a new preprint 📝 *Post-sampling degradation of viral RNA in wastewater impacts the quality of PCR-based concentration estimates* Now on bioRxiv doi.org/10.1101/2025... with @tanjastadler.bsky.social, trj2.bsky.social, Christoph Ort and others

Anyone else having trouble connecting to github due to a "potential security issue"?

Benchmarking study of single-cell feature selection finds deviance to be an effective criterion: doi.org/10.1093/bib/... . Try it yourself with our ( @kstreet.bsky.social @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @davi1893.bsky.social ) scry package @bioconductor.bsky.social : doi.org/doi:10.18129... #genomics

Currently teaching data science to CMU students in beautiful Monteverde, Costa Rica! Students are working with real data from community partners: eg, permitting for new construction, flow rates from springs that supply drinking water, bell bird calls, and macroinvertebrate water quality indicators

Overview of infectious disease forecasting and our Delphi research group @cmu.edu by Roni Rosenfeld: boxcast.tv/view/opening... (start at 20 min mark) delphi.cmu.edu

@epigenci.bsky.social makes a pretty convincing case for pseudobulk (as opposed to GLMMs) in multi-sample single cell studies here: doi.org/10.1093/bioi... . #bioinformatics

Very proud of CMU Statistics & Data Science PhD candidate Gabrielle Thivierge who just passed her thesis proposal! "Methods for performing and evaluating infectious disease forecasting and nowcasting". Check out her first paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2408.12722

Cool #Rstats package for wastewater-based #epidemiology adrian-lison.github.io/EpiSewer/ #infectiousdisease

Spatiotemporal variability of the pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) biomarker in #wastewater : a new preprint with CMU Stats PhD student Anna Rosengart and @wastewaterscan.bsky.social collaborators arxiv.org/abs/2408.12012

Mixed Poisson distributions are useful in modeling count data (eg negative binomial is Poisson mixed with gamma). But did you know the mixing distribution can actually include negative values? Read all about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2407.17614 #probability #statistics

New preprint: "Exponential tilting of subweibull random variables". arxiv.org/abs/2407.11386 Comments welcome! #probability #statistics

If I am interested in prediction intervals and am comfortable with a parametric model, what are the pros and cons of conformal prediction as opposed to bootstrapping?