G. Jogesh Babu

Professor of Statistics
Ph.D., Indian Statistical Institute, 1974

Summary of research interests

Dr. Babu has diverse research interests in both statistics and probability, and their applications to problems in biomedical research, genetics, astronomy and astrophysics. He has contributed extensively to probabilistic number theory, resampling methods, nonparametric methods, statistical group theory and asymptotic theory.

Several ongoing sky surveys over a range of wavelengths are now generating catalogs of objects (stars, galaxies, quasars, etc.) numbering in billions, with up to a hundred measured numbers for each object. The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) initiative has emerged in recognition of the need to enable efficient and objective scientific exploitation of enormous multifaceted datasets. The National Science Foundation recently awarded a million dollar research grant to G. J. Babu to lead an interdisciplinary team from Penn State, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon University, to address some of the critically important statistical challenges raised by the NVO.

Dr. Babu is a  Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a Fellow of American Statistical Association,  an elected member of the International Statistical Institute and a National Research Council's Twinning Fellow (1997-1999).  He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, and Sankhya.

Representative publications

Babu, G. J.; Rao, C. R. 2002. Confidence limits to the distance of the true distribution from a misspecified family by bootstrap. J. Statist. Plann. Inference.

Babu, G. J., and Manstavicius, E. 2002. Limit processes with independent increments for the Ewens sampling formula. The Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics.

Babu, G. J., Pathak, P. K., and Rao, C. R. 1999. Second-order correctness of the Poisson bootstrap. Annals of Statistics 27:1666--1683.

Mukherjee, S., Feigelson, E. D., Babu, G. J., Murtagh, F., Fraley, C., and Raftery, A. 1998. Three types of Gamma ray bursts. The Astrophysical Journal 50: 314--327.

Babu, G. J., and Feigelson, E. D. 1996. Astrostatistics, Chapman and Hall, London. Reprinted 1997.