Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

Grading my final exams for undergrad probability & statistics, and this response to one of my questions seriously made me laugh out loud for minutes. Should I give Extra Credit for the student's response? "Bob, you are a fool amongst fools." 😂😂😂

Our R package for VCBART, or fitting BART-based varying coefficient models, is now available on CRAN! Useful for flexible regression modeling + can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in causal inference by specifying X and Z appropriately. Check it cran.r-project.org/web/packages...

Yes. "... the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process."

A sad day for the statistics community. U. of Nebraska Board of Regents voted to eliminate UNL's Department of Statistics.

I'm at the Brin Mathematics Research Center today for the Maryland Statistics Symposium! Presenting my work on generative quantile regression w/ former PhD student Dr. Shijie Wang (U. South Carolina '24) and Dr. Minsuk Shin of Yonsei U. (published in JCGS last year).

The Maryland Statistical Symposium looks awesome! brinmrc.umd.edu/fall25-mss/ So honored to be invited to speak at this event alongside many outstanding researchers, some of whose work I have followed and admired for years!

If you're following the #UNL #statistics saga (proposed for elimination based on bad stats), you might find the seminar we gave yesterday interesting... youtu.be/fUk2R0UYWpA It was weird to rail against someone for an hour, but strangely cathartic, and the #datavis seems to have been effective?

Congrats to my student Leah Wood for successfully defending her Senior honors thesis "Spatiotemporal Modeling of Maternal Mortality in South Carolina 2018-2023"! Leah will pursue a Masters in Biostatistics next. This was on par with an excellent Masters thesis, tbh. Great job!

Having a great time visiting Columbia, SC and catching up with old friends and coworkers! I will always be grateful to @uofscstatistics.bsky.social for helping me to launch my career!

nailed it!

One week till my trip to Columbia, SC to see my Honors student Leah defend her senior thesis! She did an excellent job on Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling of maternal mortality in South Carolina from 2018-2023. She coded up the model in Stan & R and produced some very nice maps!

Excited to give a talk at the Maryland Statistical Symposium at the Brin Mathematics Research Center this December! Looking forward to connecting with many outstanding statistics researchers in the DMV area and the mid-Atlantic region.

My AISM paper "Bayesian group regularization in generalized linear models with a continuous spike-and-slab prior" is now online! I really appreciated the feedback from reviewers who wrote very thorough, high-quality reviews. A+ experience submitting here. tinyurl.com/yc6phfwv

Today is my 40th birthday, and I had a very special treat for it -- getting to meet one of my idols, Dr. Jianqin Fan! Dr. Fan's papers on SCAD penalty and sure independence screening for high-dimensional data were among the first papers I read as a PhD student. So inspiring!

Turning 40 in a week (!). Here are some old photos of me when I was 30-31 yrs old and much more fit/30 pounds lighter. Need to get back into shape, maybe join a local running group again!

I'm pleased to share that my single-authored paper "Bayesian group regularization in generalized linear models with a continuous spike-and-slab prior" has been accepted for publication in Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics! Link: raybai.net/wp-content/u...

Our paper, "Quantifying predictive uncertainty of aphasia severity in stroke patients with sparse heteroscedastic Bayesian high-dimensional regression," has been accepted for publication in Computational Statistics! Read it here: raybai.net/wp-content/u...

Going to be back at University of South Carolina November 4-5 for my Honors thesis student Leah's defense! Excited to see her exceptional work on Bayesian modeling of maternal mortality with suppressed data (a challenging project that she tackled very well). Hope to catch up with folks!

University of Florida crew now at George Mason University Statistics Dept! Ray Bai (PhD student at UF from 2014-2018), Brenda Betancourt (Assistant Professor at UF from 2018-2022), and Abolfazl Safikhani (Assistant Professor at UF from 2019-2022). Small world!

It's official now. My new faculty page at @georgemasonu.bsky.social is now up: statistics.gmu.edu/profiles/rbai2

@uofscstatistics.bsky.social has a *second* TT Assistant Professor position for Fall 2026 available. Applicants with research experience in causal inference, reinforcement learning, probabilistic graphical models, or sequential & adaptive decision-making are especially encouraged to apply.

My previous employer, the University of South Carolina Department of Statistics, has a new opening for a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position with a start date of August 16, 2026. This is a great place to work! Apply by November 17, 2025 for full consideration.

Had such a great time at our going away get-together tonight! We are so grateful for the friends we made in Columbia, SC. We will be back to visit again. Come visit us in DC! ❤️

Last day in the office at USC, and my advisees came to meet with me one last time! My Senior Honors thesis student Leah, my Summer REU student Evan, & my PhD students Fanghua and Sijian. So fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with outstanding students at USC. #professor #proudadvisor

Last week on University of South Carolina's campus. I will be in the office on Friday for some final in-person meetings and for some final orders of business. If you're at USC on Fri., please come say goodbye!

#IPAM (the institute for pure and applied mathematics) is facing a critical shortfall for operating expenses due to an unexpected suspension of NSF funding www.ipam.ucla.edu/news/nsf-fun... . Donations for emergency continuity of operations funding can be made at giving.ucla.edu/Campaign/Donat

I have some related posts on this at mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568... and mathstodon.xyz/deck/@tao/11...

New preprint "Parameter expanded variational Bayes for well-calibrated high-dimensional linear regression with spike-and-slab priors"! Read the full paper here: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Today is my last "official" day at University of South Carolina. Next month, I will be moving to the D.C. area and continuing my academic career at George Mason University. However, I really cherish my time as a faculty member at USC. #ForeverToThee Read my full post here: tinyurl.com/4fpzjeru

Thank you for all of the support the last few years, @uofscstatistics.bsky.social. I will greatly cherish my time as a faculty member at USC where I got to collaborate with great colleagues, teach and mentor excellent students, and grow as a researcher and educator!

"A Unified Three-State Model Framework for Analysis of Treatment Crossover in Survival Trials" (with my former PhD student Zile Zhao and our co-authors) was published in the most recent issue of Statistics in Biopharmaceutical Research! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1080/1946...

Hard at work this summer before the Fall semester begins. Another new preprint "BiSSLB: Binary spike-and-slab biclustering for binary datasets" with my PhD student Sijian Fan should be available in the next few weeks!

Another new preprint coming soon, hopefully in the next few weeks! This is work from the summer REU that I supervised this past summer. The undergrad students did a great job on this!

New preprint coming soon! Variational Bayes (VB) is a scalable approach for conducting Bayesian variable selection when p>>n, but the standard mean-field CAVI algorithm results in poorly calibrated predictions. We introduce a novel parameter-expanded sheme to correct this issue.

The Summer REU I'm supervising wraps up next week! My students did an excellent job studying spatial models for disease mapping and causal inference, and implementing these models on real public health data from North Carolina! Looking forward to their final report and presentation!

Celebrating 8 years of #love and #pride! Happy Pride Month! 🧑‍🤝‍🧑🏳️‍🌈

I had a truly lovely time at BNP 14: the 14th International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics at UCLA this past week! I gave a talk, listened to many interesting talks, & chatted with a number of folks. This was my first time attending a BNP conference -- I'll definitely attend again in future!

I'm headed to Los Angeles, CA today to attend the BNP 14 Conference on Bayesian nonparametrics at UCLA! I will be in L.A. this whole upcoming week. Please feel free to reach out if you would like to meet up!

(1/2) My summer REU students did such a great job! They used county-level data and a Bayesian conditional autoregressive (CAR) model to estimate the North Carolina counties' relative risks for COPD ED visits. Not an easy project for undergrads but they did it! (cont...)

Excited to give a talk for Merck Oncology this Friday! I'll be talking about my work with my former PhD student Zile Zhao on treatment switching in survival trials. I hope that the research team at Merck finds our statistical framework useful for their clinical trials!

If anyone is attending the IISA 2025 Conference at U. Nebraska-Lincoln this week, check out Session 04.M2.I72: Recent advances in high-dimensional modeling on Sun., Jun 15, 10:45 am-12:15 pm! My recent work on Bayesian VAR models (w/ Partha Sarkar of FSU) will be presented then!

Our paper "Sparse high-dimensional linear mixed modeling with a partitioned empirical Bayes ECM algorithm" in Statistics and Computing is now available online! Read at the link below. 👇 Link: doi.org/10.1007/s112...

Excited to work with summer REU students for the next 6 weeks! We will use statistical methods to create beautiful maps of both estimated disease prevalences and counterfactual prevalences under a spatial causal model.

Although I'm moving to GMU at end of July, I'm still so excited to be leading a 6-week summer REU at UofSC starting this Monday! I'll be working on spatial causal inference models for disease mapping with a small team of undergrad researchers. Excited to see what we can accomplish. :)

Some other good news! My paper "Sparse high-dimensional linear mixed modeling with a partitioned empirical Bayes ECM algorithm" (with Anja Zgodic, Jiajia Zhang, Peter Olejua, and Alexander McLain) has been accepted by Statistics and Computing! Link to paper: tinyurl.com/yu2f8rrv

✨Some news!✨ I have decided to accept a new faculty position at George Mason University, starting this August! I'm looking forward to moving to the Washington D.C. area and continuing my research at GMU. I greatly valued my time as faculty in @uofscstatistics.bsky.social! Forever to thee!

New paper (with Qingyang Liu, Shijie Wang, and Dipankar Bandyopadhyay)! Motivated by periodontal studies, we introduce a new neural network-based robust single-index model. Our method is suitable for skewed and heavy-tailed data. Read the preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2505.02153

Congrats to my student Sijian for being one of the winners for Best Student Talk at the SC-ASA Palmetto Symposium today! I really enjoyed all of the student talks. Keep up the great work!

New preprint coming out later this month! I'm excited for this work, as I have been continuing to explore deep learning for challenging statistical problems - both from methodological/theoretical and applied perspectives.