Haileab Hilafu, PhD, MS

Welcome to my website! I am an Associate Professor, and the James & Connie Vavalides Faculty Fellow, in the Department of Business Analytics and Statistics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK). I joined UTK as an Assistant Professor in August 2014, and was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) in August 2020.

My current research interests are in Statistical/Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Healthcare Analytics, Healthcare Operations. My research has been published in leading Statistics and Operations Management journals, including the Journal of Royal Statistical Society—Series B (JRSSB), Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM), Production and Operations Management (POM), Journal of Computation and Graphical Statistics (JCGS), and Statistica Sinica.

I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels on topics such as Statistical/Machine Learning Methods and Applications, Statistical Methods, and Applied Regression.

I earned a BS degree in Statistics (minor in Computer Science) from the University of Asmara, Eritrea, in 2007, and MS and PhD degrees in Statistics, respectively, in 2011 and 2014, from University of Georgia (UGA).

You can find my UTK faculty page here, and reach me via e-mail: hhilafu@utk.edu.

Google Scholar Page

PUBLICATIONS (Peer Reviewed)

Hilafu, H., Letizia, P. and Roma, P. (2025) Product Customization and Returns: The Moderating Role of National Culture. Production and Operations Management. 34(5) 886–903.

Jia, H., Hilafu, H. and Bichescu, B. (2024) Hospital-physician Integration and Cardiac Surgery Outcomes: A U-shaped Relationship? Production and Operations Management. 33(3) 645–662.

Bichescu, B. and Hilafu, H. (2023) Effects of Hospital-Acquired Conditions on Readmission Risk: The Mediating Role of Length of Stay. Manufacturing and Service Operations Management. 25(4):1603–1621.

Rabby, YW., Li, Y. and Hilafu, H. (2023) An objective absence data sampling method for landslide susceptibility mapping. Scientific Reports. 13, 1740.

Hilafu, H. and Safo, S. (2022) Sparse Sliced Inverse Regression for High Dimensional Data Analysis. BMC Bioinformatics. 23(1): 1–19.

Lee, C.E. and Hilafu, H. (2022) Quantile Martingale Difference Divergence for Dimension Reduction. Statistica Sinica. 32: 1-23.

Nayak, S., Bhandari, H., Sams, C., Sykes, V., Hilafu, H., Dalid, D., Senseman, S. and Pantalone, V. (2020) Genetic Variation for Biomass Yield and Predicted Genetic Gain in Lowland Switchgrass “Kanlow”. Agronomy. 10: 1845.

Hilafu, H., Safo, S., and Haine, L. (2020) Sparse reduced-rank regression for integrating omics data. BMC Bioinformatics. 21(1): 1–17. Matlab Codes

Hibbing, P.R., LaMunion, S.R., Hilafu, H., and Crouter, S.E. (2020) Evaluating the Performance of Bout Detection Algorithms for Wearable Sensors: The Transition Pairing Method. Journal for the Measurement of Physical Behaviour. Sep;3(3):219–227.

Wu, W. , Hilafu, H. and Xue, Y. (2019) Simultaneous estimation for semi-parametric multi-index models. Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. 89: 2354–2372.

Hilafu, H. Wu, W. (2017) Partial Projective Resampling Method for Dimension Reduction: With Applications in Partially Linear Models. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. 109: 1–14.

Hilafu, H. and Yin, X. (2017) Sufficient Dimension Reduction and Variable Selection for Correlated High Dimensional Data. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 26(1): 26–34.

Hilafu, H. (2017) Random Sliced Inverse Regression. Communication in Statistics - Simulation and Computation. 46(5): 3516–3526.

Yin, X. and Hilafu, H. (2015) Sequential Sufficient Dimension Reduction for Large p Small n Problems. Journal of Royal Statistical Society Series B. 77: 879–892.

Hilafu, H. and Yin, X. (2013) Sufficient Dimension Reduction for Multivariate Regression with Categorical Predictors. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. 63: 139–147.

TEACHING

University of Tennessee

BZAN 540: Applied Regression Analysis for Business.

BZAN 535: Statistical Methods for Business.

BZAN 615: Statistical Inference

STAT 577: Data Mining Methods and Applications

BAS 474: Data Mining and Business Analytics

STAT 201: Introduction to Statistics.

University of Georgia

STAT 4210: Statistical Methods.

STAT 2000: Introduction to Statistics.

AWARDS AND HONORS

James & Connie Vavalides Faculty Fellow. 2024 - Present.
HCB Advanced Supply Chain Collaborative (ASCC) Award, University of Tennessee. 2022.
MSBA Faculty Outstanding Commitment to Students Award, University of Tennessee. 2018.
Best Senior Student, Department of Statistics, University of Georgia. 2014.
Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, University of Georgia. 2012.
Best Beginning Theoretical Student, Department of Statistics, University of Georgia. 2010.
Graduated with Distinction, University of Asmara, Asmara, Eritrea. 2007.