Undergraduate Research in Probability and Statistics
About
The program is designed to give undergraduate students a chance to participate in meaningful research activities in the areas of probability and statistics. Another aim of the program is to give graduate students a different dimension of mentoring experience to what they experience as teaching assistants and collaborators with other graduate students. In this program, a graduate student is teamed with one or two undergraduate students and one faculty member. The graduate student will serve as a mentor as well as a collaborator of the undergraduate student(s).
Format
During one term (a semester or a summer) one or more undergraduate students will work together with one graduate students on a project devised jointly by the graduate student and a faculty member. The students will meet weekly with the supervising graduate student and sometimes the faculty member. The students, if there are more than one, can meet with each other more frequently. The PhD student will be paid $2500 for the mentorship. The undergraduate(s) will get 0.5 credit for independent study. If satisfactory progress is made, this arrangement can be continued for a second term.
Faculty advisors
Bhaswar Bhattacharya: http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~bhaswar/
Research Interests: nonparametric statistics, distribution-free inference, networks analysis, graphical models, statistical learning, combinatorial probability, discrete and computational geometry
Email: bhaswar@wharton.upenn.edu
Jiaoyang Huang: https://jiaoyang.github.io/
Research Interests: random matrices, random graphs, interacting particle systems, inverse problem, and statistical learning
Email: huangjy@wharton.upenn.edu
Robin Pemantle: https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~pemantle/
Research Interests: modern discrete probability and combinatorics
Email: pemantle@math.upenn.edu
Xin Sun: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/xinsun/
Research Interests: random geometry and statistical physics
Email: xinsun@sas.upenn.edu
Da Wu: https://sites.google.com/view/dawu
Research Interests: probability theory, mathematical physics, causal inference, time series analysis, and Applications of machine learning in Biomedical domains.
Email: dawu@sas.upenn.edu
Anderson Ye Zhang: http://andersonzhang.com/
Research Interests: spectral methods, clustering, ranking.
Email: ayz@wharton.upenn.edu
Eligibility
Undergraduate students across Penn are eligible to apply.
Graduate students at Penn from the Department of Mathematics, Department of Statistics, and Applied Mathematics and Computer Science (AMCS) program are eligible to apply.
Apply
For both undergraduate and graduate students, please send an email to all the faculty members that you are interested in working with. We will try our best to match. In your email please include
1. a short introduction of your background and interest.
2. the list of math and statistics courses that you have taken.
3. your CV.
Deadline for Spring 2024: 1/14/2024
Projects in Spring 2023
Spectral Record Linkage and Gun Violence
Undergraduate member: Iris Horng; Graduate mentor: Qishuo Yin; Faculty advisor: Dylan Small.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Spectral Norm for Random Kernel Matrices
Undergraduate members: David Kogan; Graduate mentors: Sagnik Nandy; Faculty advisor: Jiaoyang Huang.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Dropout and Network Pruning
Undergraduate member: Aryan Singh; Graduate mentor: Wei Fan; Faculty advisor: Yuting Wei.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Monochromatic emptytriangles in two-colored point set
Undergraduate member: Kaiqi Wang; Graduate mentor: Xinyu Xie; Faculty advisor: Bhaswar Bhattacharya.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Projects in Fall 2022
Eigenvalues for Random Kernel Matrices
Undergraduate members: David Kogan; Graduate mentors: Sagnik Nandy; Faculty advisor: Jiaoyang Huang.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Spectral alignment of correlated graphs
Undergraduate member: David Jin; Graduate mentor: Shuxiao Chen; Faculty advisor: Anderson Zhang.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Projects in Spring 2022
Deletion Channels
Undergraduate members: Alexandru Lopotenco and Ryan Jeong; Graduate mentors: Abhinandan Dalal and Ziang Niu; Faculty advisor: Robin Pemantle.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Inhomogeneous W-random Graphs
Undergraduate member: Ernest Ng; Graduate mentor: Anirban Chaterjee; Faculty advisor: Bhaswar Bhattacharya.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Generative Adversarial Networks and Two-Sample Testing
Undergraduate member: Arjun Shah; Graduate mentor: Yachong Yang; Faculty advisor: Bhaswar Bhattacharya.
Slides for Final Presentation.
Simulations of the Six-Vertex Model and Loop Erased Random Walks
Undergraduate member: Max Tjauw; Graduate mentor: Zijie Zhuang; Faculty advisor: Xin Sun.
Slides for Final Presentation.