Journal names statistical work on environmental extremes to its 'selected articles' list

A paper by ISR-affiliated Professor Benjamin Kedem (Math), his Ph.D. student Xuze Zhang, and their colleagues is being honored by the International Journal of Statistics in Medical Research as one of 20 “selected articles” published in the journal in the past 11 years. The journal editors chose the article to add to its list in May 2023.

In June 2021, the team wrote “On the Probabilities of Environmental Extremes,” work that dealt with the problem of determining the probability of exceeding a high threshold of a variable of interest based on observations that are much smaller than the threshold. This is a common problem for environmental researchers and epidemiologists. It is made more difficult when the data available may only be of moderate size. In the paper, the generic problem is addressed by repeatedly fusing the real data numerous times with synthetic computer-generated samples. The threshold probability of interest is approximated by certain subsequences created by an iterative algorithm that gives precise estimates. The method is illustrated using environmental data including monitoring data of nitrogen dioxide levels in the air.

In addition to Kedem and Zhang, the other authors are Saumyadipta Pyne of the Health Analytics Network, LLC, in Pittsburgh, Pa., and Ryan Stauffer of the Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Lab at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2021, Kedem also worked with Pyne and Stauffer on “Augmented Reality: A Computational Framework Applied to Modeling the Dynamics of Air Pollution.” It was presented at the Society of Statistics, Computer and Applications annual conference that year. The paper used augmented reality to model the drastic decrease in air pollution levels in Washington D.C. caused by lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, an example of an extreme event.

Published June 20, 2023