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 over 160 academic descendants.

• A one-day Short course on Subnational Bayesian Population Projections will be given as part of the Population Association of America 2025 Annual Meeting. in Washington DC, on April 10, 2025.
  New: This will now be offered in a hybrid format. To apply to join remotely, email raftery@uw.edu by April 7 from your professional email with the subject "Join PAA workshop", and include a sentence saying why it would be professionally useful to you.

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News

• 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.
• Code for Porwal & Raftery (2022): Code to implement the experiments in Porwal & Raftery (2022) is now available here.
• Book freely available online: Our book, Model-Based Clustering, Classification, and Density Estimation Using mclust in R, is now freely available online.
• Emeritus status: Adrian became Blumstein-Jordan Professor Emeritus of Statistics and Sociology in September 2024, retiring from classroom teaching and adminstration at the University of Washington.
• Career Celebration Conference: The Conference on Applied, Bayesian, Computational, Demographic and Environmental Statistics (ABCDE) to celebrate Adrian's career was held on August 9, 2024 at the University of Washington.
• Interview on UN population projections: The article Developing and implementing the UN's probabilistic population projections as a milestone for Bayesian demography: An interview with Adrian Raftery, by Monica Alexander, was published in Demographic Research in July 2024.
• ISBA Fellow: Adrian was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) at the 2024 ISBA World Meeting in July 2024.
• Psychometric Keynote address: Adrian gave a keynote address at the International Meeting of the Psychometric Society in Prague, July 2024.
• Career interview:An interview with Adrian about his career, by Leontine Alkema and Brendan Murphy, was published in the International Statistical Review in October 2023. (Also available on arXiv.)
• Hollander lecture: Adrian gave the Myles Hollander Distinguished Lecture at Florida State University in October 2023.
• Website update: This website got its annual major update on May 7, 2024. New publications were added.

Recent Book, Journal Articles, Preprints (since 2023)

Book on mclust and model-based clustering:

Statistical methodology

• Easily Computed Marginal Likelihoods from Posterior Simulation Using the THAMES Estimator.
• Multiple Imputation of Hierarchical Nonlinear Time Series Data with an Application to School Enrollment Data.
• Bayesian hyperbolic multidimensional scaling. Preprint.
• Model-Based Clustering.
• Effect of model space priors on statistical inference with model uncertainty.
• Latent Position Network Models.

Statistical demography

• Bringing Age Back In: Accounting for Population Age Distribution in Forecasting Migration.
• Probabilistic County-Level Population Projections.
• Bayesian projections of total fertility rate conditional on the United Nations sustainable development goals.
• Probabilistic Estimation and Projection of the Annual Total Fertility Rate Accounting for Past Uncertainty.
• Probabilistic Population Forecasting: Short to Very Long Term.

Note: These papers are being made available here to facilitate the timely dissemination of scholarly work; copyright and all related rights are retained by the copyright holders.

Updated April 2, 2025; last major update, May 7, 2024.

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