Colloquium: Reminiscing About Statistical REU Projects and Past REU Students

Join us for our next invited speaker of the semester! Dr. Anant Godbole will be presenting at 11 AM in the Z. Smith Reynolds (ZSR) Auditorium, Room 404. Dr. Godbole’s talk is entitled: 

“Reminiscing About Statistical REU Projects and Past REU Students” 

Abstract: I was awarded my first REU Grant in 1991 and I was REU director and sole advisor from 1991 to 2023.  My research formed a fundamental symbiosis with that of my REU students, with most projects being in combinatorics/graph theory/discrete probability.  However, all three of my degrees are in Statistics (I will say more about the nature of those degrees).  

It is no surprise, therefore, that many of the projects I supervised were “statistically oriented”, including Dr. Heather Shappell’s (Heather is at WFUSM).  I’ll talk about 2-3 such statistical projects.  However, just a few of these projects, though dealing with distribution theory, truly took the leap into the statistical domain. An exception is a paper with my MS student Dr. Marilyn Agin.

I would like to revisit those “statistically oriented” papers and lay down some ideas of how these papers may be “statistified” via the formulation of tests for randomness.  Critical needs include 

• The formulation of H_a;
• Approximations of the distributions of the test statistic T under H_a, and;  
• Finding good data sets.

Since I am now retired, I have time on my hands and will mention 2-3 projects that I’d like to undertake, possibly together with WFU folks (if there is interest).  Note: I am statistically quite naïve, and could use all the help I can get!