How can I apply to the Columbia Statistics PhD Program?
  • Requirements
    • Suggested Prerequisites: A student admitted to the PhD program normally has a background in linear algebra and real analysis, and has taken a few courses in statistics, probability, and programming. Students who are quantitatively trained or have substantial background/experience in other scientific disciplines are also encouraged to apply for admission.
    • GRE General Test is suggested but not required for Fall 2026 applications for admission.
    • Language requirement: The English Proficiency Test requirement (TOEFL) is a Provost’s requirement that cannot be waived.
    • The Columbia GSAS minimum requirements for TOEFL and IELTS are: 100 (IBT), 600 (PBT) TOEFL, or 7.5 IELTS. To see if this requirement can be waived for you, please visit the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Admissions Department Frequently Asked Questions for information on requirements and waiver eligibility..
  • Deadline: January 8, 2026.
  • Application process: Please apply by completing the Application for Admission to the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.
  • Timeline: The Department of Statistics admits students to their PhD Program in September only. Admissions decisions are made in mid-March of each year for the following Fall semester.

Quick Links

Upcoming Events

Recent Faculty Publications

Pathfinder: Parallel quasi-Newton variational inference.
Andrew Gelman (2022).
Before data analysis: Additional recommendations for designing experiments to learn about the world.
Andrew Gelman (2023).
Toward a taxonomy of trust for probabilistic machine learning. Science Advances, 9(7), eabn3999.
Broderick, T., Gelman, A., Meager, R., Smith, A. L., & Zheng, T. (2023).
Taylor's law of fluctuation scaling for semivariances and higher moments of heavy tailed data, (PNAS November 16,2021)
Brown, M., Cohen, J.E., Tang, C-F., & Yam, S.C.P. (2021).
Privacy-preserving parametric inference: a case for robust statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 116(534), 969-983.
Avella-Medina, M. (2021).
Heavy-tailed distributions, correlations, kurtosis, and Taylor’s law of fluctuation scaling. Proceedings of the Royal Society A 476:20200610.
J. E. Cohen, Richard A. Davis, Gennady Samorodnitsky (2020).
A Proxy Variable View of Shared Confounding. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 10697-10707). PMLR.
Wang, Y., & Blei, D. (2021, July).
Count time series: A methodological review. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1-15.
Davis, R. A., Fokianos, K., Holan, S. H., Joe, H., Livsey, J., Lund, R., ... & Ravishanker, N. (2021).
High-frequency analysis of parabolic stochastic PDEs. The Annals of Statistics, 48(2), 1143-1167.
Chong, C. (2020).
The continuous categorical: a novel simplex-valued exponential family. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 3637-3647). PMLR.
Gordon-Rodriguez, E., Loaiza-Ganem, G., & Cunningham, J. (2020, November).
On the bias and variance of odds ratio, relative risk and false discovery proportion. Communications in Statistics-Theory and Methods, 1-31.
Pang, G., Alemayehu, D., de la Peña, V., & Klass, M. J. (2020).
Bayesian statistics and modelling. Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 1(1), 1-26.
van de Schoot, R., Depaoli, S., King, R., Kramer, B., Märtens, K., Tadesse, M. G., ... & Yau, C. (2021).
A Joint MLE Approach to Large-Scale Structured Latent Attribute Analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association, (just-accepted), 1-39.
Gu, Y., & Xu, G. (2021).
Self-Tuning Bandits over Unknown Covariate-Shifts. In Algorithmic Learning Theory (pp. 1114-1156). PMLR.
Suk, J., & Kpotufe, S. (2021, March).
An adaptable generalization of Hotelling’s $ T^{2} $ test in high dimension. The Annals of Statistics, 48(3), 1815-1847.
Li, H., Aue, A., Paul, D., Peng, J., & Wang, P. (2020).
An Interaction-based Convolutional Neural Network (ICNN) Towards Better Understanding of COVID-19 X-ray Images. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.06911.
Lo, S. H., & Yin, Y. (2021).
Latent feature extraction for process data via multidimensional scaling. psychometrika, 85(2), 378-397.
Tang, X., Wang, Z., He, Q., Liu, J., & Ying, Z. (2020).
Joint estimation of parameters in Ising model. The Annals of Statistics, 48(2), 785-810.
Ghosal, P., & Mukherjee, S. (2020).
Convergence to the mean-field game limit: a case study. The Annals of Applied Probability, 30(1), 259-286.
Nutz, M., San Martin, J., & Tan, X. (2020).
Neural clustering processes. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 7455-7465). PMLR.
Pakman, A., Wang, Y., Mitelut, C., Lee, J., & Paninski, L. (2020, November).
Credit Risk, Liquidity, and Bubbles. International Review of Finance, 20(3), 737-746.
Jarrow, R., & Protter, P. (2020).
An asymptotic rate for the LASSO loss. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (pp. 3664-3673). PMLR.
Rush, C. (2020, June).
Multivariate rank-based distribution-free nonparametric testing using measure transportation. Journal of the American Statistical Association, (just-accepted), 1-45.
Deb, N., & Sen, B. (2021).
Asset pricing with general transaction costs: Theory and numerics. Mathematical Finance, 31(2), 595-648.
Gonon, L., Muhle‐Karbe, J., & Shi, X. (2021).
Estimating causal effects in studies of human brain function: New models, methods and estimands. The annals of applied statistics, 14(1), 452.
Sobel, M. E., & Lindquist, M. A. (2020).
A note on the Screaming Toes game. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.04805.
Tavaré, S. (2020).
Testing for stationarity of functional time series in the frequency domain. The Annals of Statistics, 48(5), 2505-2547.
Aue, A., & Van Delft, A. (2020).
Distinguishing cause from effect using quantiles: Bivariate quantile causal discovery. In International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 9311-9323). PMLR.
Tagasovska, N., Chavez-Demoulin, V., & Vatter, T. (2020, November).
Robust estimation of superhedging prices. The Annals of Statistics, 49(1), 508-530
Obłój, J., & Wiesel, J. (2021).
Optimal stopping and worker selection in crowdsourcing: An adaptive sequential probability ratio test framework. Statistica Sinica, 31(1), 519-546.
Li, X., Chen, Y., Chen, X., Liu, J., & Ying, Z. (2021)
Revisiting colocalization via optimal transport. Nature Computational Science, 1(3), 177-178.
Wang, S., & Yuan, M. (2021).
Large‐scale, image‐based tree species mapping in a tropical forest using artificial perceptual learning. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 12(4), 608-618.
Tang, C., Uriarte, M., Jin, H., C Morton, D., & Zheng, T. (2021).
From Decoupling and Self-Normalization to Machine Learning
Victor H. de la Pena
Capacity-Achieving Sparse Superposition Codes via Approximate Message Passing Decoding
Cynthia Rush, Adam Greig, Ramji Venkataramanan
Slice Sampling on Hamiltonian Trajectories
John P. Cunningham, Benjamin Bloem-Reddy
Feature Augmentation via Nonparametrics and Selection (FANS) in High Dimensional Classification
Fan, J., Feng, Y., Jiang, J. and Tong, X.
Topic-adjusted visibility metric for scientific articles. Ann. Appl. Stat. 10 (2016), no. 1, 1--31.
Linda S. L. Tan, Aik Hui Chan, and Tian Zheng
Columbia University
In the City of New York
116th Street and Broadway, New York, NY 10027
© 2014 Columbia University

Website by Sunray Computer
DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS
Columbia University
Room 1005 SSW, MC 4690
1255 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

Phone: 212.851.2132
Fax: 212.851.2164

Department of Statistics on LinkedIn