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 holds an International Chair at 3IA, INRIA, Université Côte d'Azur. 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

• Website update: This website got its annual major update on May 7, 2026. New publications were added.
• INRIA International Chair: Adrian was appointed as International Chair, 3IA, INRIA, Université Côte d'Azur, 2026-2029. He was interviewed about his plans.
• Prague lecture: Adrian gave the Invited Lecture on Statistical and Environmental Modelling, Insitute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Science, Prague, in November 2025.
• Suessmilch Lecture at Max Planck Insitute: Adrian gave the Suessmilch Lecture at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, on October 8, 2025.
• Irish Statistical Assocation Honorary Life Membership: Adrian was made an Honorary Life Member of the Irish Statistical Association in 2025. 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.
• Book freely available online: Our 2023 book, Model-Based Clustering, Classification, and Density Estimation Using mclust in R, is now freely available online.

Recent Publications (since 2025)

Statistical Methodology

• A Structured Estimator for large Covariance Matrices in the Presence of Pairwise and Spatial Covariates. Preprint.
• Comparing Variable Selection and Model Averaging Methods for Logistic Regression. Preprint.
• Multiple Imputation of Hierarchical Nonlinear Time Series Data with an Application to School Enrollment Data. Preprint.
• A privacy-preserved and high-utility synthesis strategy for risk-based stratified subgroups of the Canadian Scleroderma Patient Registry data.

Statistical Demography

• Bringing Age Back In: Accounting for Population Age Distribution in Forecasting Migration. Preprint.
• Bayesian Projection of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Populations. Preprint.
• Optimal pandemic control strategies and cost-effectiveness of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions in the United States. Preprint.

Statistical Climate Science

• Pattern scaling: How local warming is related to global warming: An explainer. Open access version.
• Mitigation efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and meet the Paris Agreement have been offset by economic growth.

Updated May 7, 2026.

Copyright 2005-2026 by Adrian E. Raftery and University of Washington; all rights reserved.