News
June 2025: The paper "Elastic functional changepoint detection of climate impacts from localized sources" with J. Derek Tucker was selected as the recipient of the 2024 Wiley-TIES Best Environmetrics Paper Award.
May 2025: The paper "A functional regression model for heterogeneous BioGeoChemical Argo data in the Southern Ocean" with Moritz Korte-Stapff, Stilian Stoev, and Tailen Hsing was accepted at Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C: Applied Statistics.
March 2025: The paper "Multivariate confluent hypergeometric covariance functions with simultaneous flexibility over smoothness and tail decay" with Anindya Bhadra was published at Mathematical Geosciences.
July 2024: The paper "Multivariate Matern models---A spectral approach" with Stilian Stoev and Tailen Hsing was accepted at Statistical Science.
May 2024: The paper "Autocalibration of the E3SM Version 2 atmosphere model using a PCA-based surrogate for spatial fields" with Benjamin Moore Wagman, Kenny Chowdhary, and Lyndsay Shand was selected as an "Editor's Highlight" in Eos, the science news magazine published by the American Geophysical Union. Check out the highlight or the paper in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.
About Me
I began in Fall 2023 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. I received my PhD in Statistics at the University of Michigan in 2022 studying under the supervision of Tailen Hsing and Stilian Stoev. I spent one year as a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories from 2022-2023. My research focuses on environmental applications of statistics, especially in oceanography and climate, as well as some broader interests:
spatial statistics/multivariate processes
functional data analysis
climate model calibration
changepoint analysis
statistics and public policy
Publications
Korte-Stapff, M.*, Yarger, D.*, Stoev, S., Hsing, T. "A functional regression model for heterogeneous BioGeoChemical Argo data in the Southern Ocean." Accepted, JRSSC. arxiv: 2211.04012 * denotes equal contribution.
Yarger, D., Bhadra, A. (2025) "Multivariate confluent hypergeometric covariance functions with simultaneous flexibility over smoothness and tail decay." Mathematical Geosciences. doi:10.1007/s11004-025-10185-6; arxiv:2312.05682.
Yarger, D., Stoev, S., Hsing, T. "Multivariate Matern models---A spectral approach." Accepted, Statistical Science. arxiv: 2309.02584.
Yarger, D., Wagman, B. M., Chowdhary, K., Shand, L. (2024) "Autocalibration of the E3SM Version 2 atmosphere model using a PCA-based surrogate for spatial fields." Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. doi: 10.1029/2023MS003961; arxiv: 2308.06877.
Tucker, J. D., Yarger, D. (2024). "Elastic functional changepoint detection of climate impacts from localized sources." Environmetrics. doi: 10.1002/env.2826; arxiv: 2211.12687.
Yarger, D., Stoev, S., and Hsing, T. (2021). "A functional-data approach to the Argo data.'' Annals of Applied Statistics. doi: 10.1214/21-AOAS1477; arxiv: 2006/05020.
Code available at https://github.com/dyarger/argofda
Accompanying R Shiny Applications linked at https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/argostatistics/home/fdapaper
Manuscripts
Yarger, D., Tucker, J. D. "Detecting changepoints in globally-indexed functional time series." Submitted to Spatial Statistics. arxiv: 2308.05915.
Hansen, D., Yarger, D. "ArgoSSM: A state-space model of ocean floats under ice." arxiv: 2210.00118
Teaching
At Purdue University:
Stat 417: Statistical theory (Fall 2023, 2024, 2025, Spring 2024, 2025)
Graduate student instructor at University of Michigan:
Stats 250: Introductory statistics (Fall 2017)
Stats 425: Upper-level undergraduate probability (Winter 2018)
Stats 620: PhD-level course on stochastic processes and Markov chains (Winter 2021)
Other teaching (University of Michigan):
August Math Preparation Workshop Instructor: a thirty-hour, week-long course split between two instructors for incoming PhD and Masters students (August 2021)
Fall Prep Workshop Instructor: a nine-hour course on upper-level undergraduate probability and statistics for incoming Masters and PhD students (August 2020)
Other activities
Department of Statistics Colloquium Chair (Fall 2024-Spring 2025)
Mentor, University of Michigan Statistics Directed Reading Program (Fall 2020 - Winter 2021)
Volunteer, University of Michigan Statistics in the Community (STATCOM) (Fall 2019 - Summer 2020)
Projects
Policy Analytics internship, Federal Reserve Board of Governors (Summer 2017)
Junior Fellow, Joint Program in Survey Methodology, Improving Motor Carrier Safety Measurement, National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Summer 2016)
Center for Interdisciplinary Research, St. Olaf College, Assessing Professional Learning Communities (2015-2016)
Education
Ph.D. Candidate, Statistics, University of Michigan (2019-2022)
Ph.D. Precandidate, Statistics, University of Michigan (2017-2019)
B.A. St. Olaf College, Mathematics Major, Concentrations in Statistics and Linguistics (2013-2017)
Contact
anyarger, purdue.edu, dyarger, umich.edu
