Academic Overview

The department offers offers a major and minor in Statistics for undergraduate students. The department also offers the following graduate degrees: Master of Science, Doctor of Philosophy, and Ph.D. minor. The department also houses the interdisciplinary MS in Financial Mathematics program.

The requirements for a degree in statistics are flexible, depending on the needs and interests of the student. Some students may be interested in the theory of statistics and/or probability, whereas others may wish to apply statistical and probabilistic methods to a substantive area. See also the department Vertical Integration of Research and Education (VIGRE) program with focused activity in Computational Biology, Mathematical Finance and Information Science.

In addition to courses for Statistics majors, the department offers a number of service courses designed for students in other departments. These tend to emphasize the application of statistical techniques rather than their theoretical development.

The department has long recognized the relation of statistical theory to applications. It has fostered this by encouraging a liaison with other departments in the form of joint and courtesy faculty appointments: Economics (Anderson), Education (Olkin, Rogosa), Electrical Engineering (Cover), Geological and Environmental Sciences (Switzer), Health Research and Policy (Brown, Efron, Hastie, Johnstone, Moses, Olshen, Tibshirani), Mathematics (Dembo, Diaconis), Political Science (Jackman), and the Stanford Linear Accelerator (Friedman). The research activities of the department reflect an interest in both applied and theoretical statistics, and probability. There are workshops in biology-medicine and in environmental factors in health.

For more information, please refer to the Stanford Bulletin.

Computing Facilities
The computing environment in the department is constantly being updated. The principal facility currently consists of an SGI file server, an HP server, and a DEC fileserver, although a variety of other systems can be accessed. Students are actively encouraged to become familiar with statistical computing and to use the computing facilities to prepare research reports and homework problems where available.