Data science research is driven by the massive amounts of data that can be collected and the opportunities and challenges of collecting and managing the data and drawing valid conclusions from it. Large scale data often contain huge numbers of variables and observations, which can invalidate traditional analysis and require advanced development. Faculty are engaged in a number of research areas motivated by big data applications including the following:

• Statistical inference and machine learning for high dimensional data
• Computational statistics
• Parallel computing in statistics
• Functional image analysis in medicine and neuroscience
• Climate modeling
• Network analysis