Statistics can be applied almost anywhere; to reflect this, the concentration allows many opportunities to learn about how statistics is used in other fields; by definition, statistics should not be studied in isolation. The concentration requirements can be fulfilled via any of the four tracks:
Degree Tracks
- Core Statistical Principles and Methods
- Data Science
- Quantitative Finance
- Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB)
The general track is the most flexible track, providing a foundation in principles and techniques for statistical theory, methods, and applications. This foundation can be applied to a myriad of fields. As John Tukey said, "The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everybody else's backyard."
The data science track explores the interface of statistics and computer science. Courses involve a mixture of these fields, with applications to areas such as prediction, recommendation systems, and analysis of massive data sets.
The finance track gives strong preparation for many careers in finance and actuarial work. Specific topics addressed include statistical inference for stochastic models that arise in financial/insurance modeling as well as computational techniques that have become standard in pricing, hedging and risk assessment of complex financial/insurance instruments
The BCB track mixes together biology, statistics, and computation, giving models and tools for studying biological data such as gene and protein sequences. This is motivated in part by the recent explosion of size and complexity of data in the biological sciences, which has required the development of new statistical methods and models, such as models for gene and protein motifs search, phylogenetic reconstruction, and gene expression analysis.