Adrian E. Raftery

Adrian is Blumstein-Jordan Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Sociology at the University of Washington. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. He works on the development of new statistical methods for the social and environmental sciences. An elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, he was identified as the world's most cited researcher in mathematics for the decade 1995-2005 by Thomson-ISI. He has supervised 36 Ph.D. graduates, of whom 21 hold or have held tenure-track university faculty positions, and has 170 academic descendants.

News

• Suessmilch Lecture at Max Planck Insitute: Adrian will give the Suessmilch Lecture at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, on October 8, 2025.
• Paper on COVID interventions published: Research by Nicholas Irons and Adrian found that US COVID-19 school closures were not cost-effective, but other non-pharmaceutical interventions were. The article was published in BMC Global and Public Health.
• Website update: This website got its annual major update on August 13, 2025. New publications were added.
• Irish Statistical Assocation Honorary Life Membership: Adrian was made an Honorary Life Member of the Irish Statistical Association. He is one of only two living such members.
• Oxford talk: Adrian gave the Distinguished Speaker Seminar, Department of Statistics, University of Oxford in June 2025.
• Keynote talk in Ireland: Adrian gave the Opening Keynote address at the annual Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland, in Galway in May 2025.
• R.L. Anderson Distinguished Lecture: Adrian gave the R.L. Anderson Distinguished Lecture at the University of Kentucky in April 2025.
• Foreward to new migration book: Adrian wrote the Foreward to the new book From Uncertainty to Policy: A Guide to Migration Scenarios, edited by Jakub Bijak, published December 2024.
• ASA Section on Statistical Computing Keynote: Adrian gave the keynote address at the Mini-Symposium of the Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical Association, on "Statistical Inference with Model Uncertainty", about work with Anupreet Porwal, in November 2024. Watch it here, starting at 7:30.
• The Second Workshop on Bayesian Methods for the Social Sciences , was held 16-18 Oct 2024, in Amsterdam.
• David Finney Lecture: Adrian delivered the David Finney Lecture at the University of Edinburgh in October 2024.
• Book freely available online: Our 2023 book, Model-Based Clustering, Classification, and Density Estimation Using mclust in R, is now freely available online.

Recent Book, Journal Articles, Preprints (since 2024)

Book on mclust and model-based clustering:

Statistical Methodology

• A Structured Estimator for large Covariance Matrices in the Presence of Pairwise and Spatial Covariates.
• Multiple Imputation of Hierarchical Nonlinear Time Series Data with an Application to School Enrollment Data.
• A privacy-preserved and high-utility synthesis strategy for risk-based stratified subgroups of the Canadian Scleroderma Patient Registry data.
• Easily Computed Marginal Likelihoods from Posterior Simulation Using the THAMES Estimator.
• Bayesian hyperbolic multidimensional scaling. Free preprint.

Statistical Demography

• US COVID-19 school closure was not cost-effective, but other measures were.
• Forecasting Net Migration By Age: The Flow-Difference Approach.
• Bayesian Projection of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Populations.
• Bringing Age Back In: Accounting for Population Age Distribution in Forecasting Migration.
• Bayesian projections of total fertility rate conditional on the United Nations sustainable development goals.
• Foreword on Migration Scenarios.

Updated September 29, 2025; last major update August 13, 2025.

Copyright 2005-2025 by Adrian E. Raftery and University of Washington; all rights reserved.