Congratulations to Yiren Hou

Statistics Student Yiren Hou is a recipient of the CURO Summer Research Fellowship for Summer 2022. This award supports undergraduates to pursue intensive and immersive faculty-mentored research over summer. Under the guidance of Dr. Abhyuday Mandal and Dr. Gauri Datta, Yiren will utilize Bayesian approach to address data with extreme outliers, which is a challenge commonly faced by small area estimation. Small areas are subpopulations with small samples, for example, county and district-level are subpopulations. They are harder to provide reliable direct estimates about the areas compared to information provided at larger populations. This research proposes a valid mixture model where the random effects, residual effect of independent variables on dependent variables, can be from two distributions. These distributions are probability distributions used to model the data with certain behaviors, and one of them named t-distribution with small degree of freedom is applicable to give estimates of small populations with outliers. Yiren will present her research at the Summer Final Forum and CURO Symposium in 2023.