Statistics Ph.D. Students Wang, Gao win ENAR Distinguished Paper Awards

Two Ph.D. students from the UC Irvine’s Department of Statistics, Yuxiao Wang and Xu Gao, were recently named winners in the Eastern North American Region (ENAR) International Biometrics Society’s 2017 Distinguished Student Paper Award competition.

Wang’s paper, titled “Exploratory Analysis of High Dimensional Time Series with Applications to Multichannel Electroencephalograms,” addresses the major hurdle of high dimensionality in EEG analysis by extracting the optimal lower dimensional representations. Gao’s winning paper, titled “Evolutionary State Space Model and its Application to Time-Frequency Local Field Potentials Analysis,” proposes an evolutionary state space model (E-SSM) for analyzing high dimensional brain signals (in particular, local field potentials in rats) whose statistical properties evolve over the course of a non-spatial memory experiment.

Both student papers will be presented in March at the ENAR 2017 Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C.