Joshua Habiger
Department of Statistics
Dr. Habiger is a professor in the Department of Statistics. He earned a B.S. in mathematics and M.S. in statistics from Kansas State university in 2004 and 2006, respectively. In 2010, he earned a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of South Carolina and joined the Department of Statistics at OSU.
As for research, Dr. Habiger enjoys developing statistical methods for the analysis of high dimensional (HD) data, such as those arising in the “omics”, imaging and in other areas where high-throughput technology is utilized. What are HD data? In general, HD data sets arise when thousands or millions of measurements are taken per sample, but there are a relatively few number of samples available, say 10 or 20. Data analysis may call for model selection or variable selection and prediction or classification. While there is extensive research aimed at either variable selection, model selection, prediction, or classification with HD data (including some by Habiger), his current focus is on methods that can select replicable models or variables and generate reliable predictions or classification. Habiger also dabbles a bit in mathematical statistics, the intersection of selective inference and the ”replicability crisis,” categorical data analysis.
He has taught a wide variety of courses at the undergraduate and graduate level for
statistics majors and students from across the social and natural sciences at OSU.
Currently, he teaches two core course for statistics Ph.D. students, an undergraduate
elementary statistics course, and two applied courses for statistics majors and non-majors.
The applied courses - Statistical Machine Learning and R Programming - are probably
his favorite because he gets to work with such a wide variety of graduate students
with diverse backgrounds and research interests. It is especially fun when student
thesis data and data from collaborators at OSU are incorporated into the curriculum.
This way we get to learn from (real and relevant) data together.
Dr. Habiger has been graduate coordinator in the Department of Statistics since 2019.
He is always interested in exploring new synergistic research and teaching activities
that involve statistics graduate students in some way. He also served as Associate
Editor for The American Statistician (TAS) from 2017 - 2024. This was particularly
rewarding after the journal published the American Statistical Association’s infamous
statement on 5 common p-value misuses and called for more research in the area. There
were many creative ideas.
In his free time, Dr. Habiger enjoys playing guitar, piano, most any racket sport and frisbee golf. He has a wonderful wife and son and is a “people person”. He likes to laugh.