Sign in

Ray Bai

@raybai07.bsky.social
242 followers 220 following 114 posts

Assistant Professor of Statistics at George Mason University, French bulldog owner, and pop culture enthusiast. Any views expressed on here are my own, not my employer's. 👨‍🏫📊 📚👨‍🍳🏳️‍🌈 raybai.net

PostsRepliesMedia
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Super excited to teach Probabilistic Machine Learning in the Spring! Beyond "foundations," I plan to cover graphical models, latent variable models, approximate inference methods, Gaussian processes, Bayesian neural networks, deep generative models, and structural causal models!
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My website is back up! Check out my new site here 👉 raybai.net New links for my blog posts about: - the tenure-track job market ➡️ raybai.net/blog/academi... - Statistics PhD admissions ➡️ raybai.net/blog/demysti... - recent trends in Statistics ➡️ raybai.net/blog/seven-m...
raybai.net
Ray Bai – Assistant Professor, George Mason University
Ray Bai is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at George Mason University. Research interests: Bayesian statistics, deep learning, and causal inference.
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Interesting read from Terence Tao "Recommendations of the Summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI" tinyurl.com/yfehwsk5 Is there something like this for Statistics? Read my LinkedIn post describing some ways I've adjusted my own pedagogy here➡️ lnkd.in/p/eP5nNjh5
tinyurl.com
Recommendations of the Summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI
[This is a guest post by Bryna Kra and Rachel Ward. -T.] The Summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI was held September 17–18, 2026, jointly hosted by the Harvard Department of Mathematics an…
100
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
(1/3) Had to calibrate my Advanced Regression class a bit (a required class for Statistics PhD students), since I wanted to incorporate in-class peer reviews for student projects. But I finally got it! Below is the final schedule! Thread continues in replies ⬇️
110
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Looking forward to the class projects from in my PhD-level Advanced Regression class! The students chose topics from a variety of fields, including survival analysis, causal inference, spatial statistics, high-dimensional data, nonparametric regression, and machine learning!
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Pleased to share that our paper "A monotone single-index modal regression powered by deep neural networks for non-Gaussian periodontal data" (joint with my former students Shijie Wang and Qingyang Liu and Qingyang's postdoc advisor Dipankar Bandyopadhyay) has been accepted by Biostatistics!
110
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Excited to teach an upgraded Advanced Regression class required for Statistics PhD students! I've taught variants of this class before, but this time, I'm introducing new weekly units on deep learning, causal inference, conformal prediction, and anytime-valid inference!
020
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
If you're at EcoSta, come join my session "Modern Advances in Bayesian Computation and Inference" this weekend! Aug. 9, 10:00 am Japan time (or Sat., Aug. 8, 9:00 pm EST if you're virtual!) Very cool talks on DGMs, variational Bayes, and approximate MCMC for scalable Bayesian inference.
011
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
New NSF grant awarded, collaborative with Ting Fung Ma from the University of South Carolina! We will use this grant to develop new methods for scalable, single-pass inference on large dependent datasets!
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
First meal of my first full day in Japan: an excellent Japanese-style breakfast! Excited to attend the 2026 ISBA World Meeting, explore Nagoya, and visit Gibhli Park this upcoming week.
030
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I am on my way to Nagoya, Japan for the 2026 ISBA World Meeting! Let's catch up if you're also going to be there! As a diehard Studio Gibhli fan, I also can't wait to visit Gibhli Park.
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I've found Google Gemini to be very helpful in some prose refinement and technical editing (esp. when I need to fit page limits), but its suggestions are often very dramatic and almost theatrical too -- using terms like "pristine," "total vacuum," "mathematical collapse." LMAO
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
It was a great pleasure to catch up with my @uofscstatistics.bsky.social colleagues at the 2026 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium here at GMU last week! Here I am with USC faculty Shanghong Xie, Zhiling Gu (incoming Asst Prof), and Edsel Pena (not pictured: Ting Fung Ma and Yuexuan Wu).
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
I will be speaking at the 2026 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium (symposium2026.icsa.org) next Monday, June 15 in Track 10: Advances in Sampling (1:00-2:30 PM)! My talk will be about the intrinsic limits to heavy-tailed learning with deep generative models. Come join if interested!
symposium2026.icsa.org
2026 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
South Carolina Senate rejected redistricting plan 2 weeks ago, and now Nancy Mace is out of a job? Great job, my former state of residence! www.advocate.com/politics/nat...
advocate.com
Sarah McBride gets last laugh after Nancy Mace’s devastating election loss: ‘Happy Pride, Nancy’
The Advocate was there and got video, and it's awesome.
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
Looking forward to my organized session "Modern Advances in Bayesian Computation and Inference" at EcoSta 2026 this August! Some great talks on state-of-the-art Bayesian inference using variational inference, generative models, and scalable MCMC!
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
Lovely time visiting U. of South Carolina for the USC Department of Statistics 40th Anniversary conference! During my visit, I also got to enjoy Korean bbq at MOA with my 2 USC PhD students Sijian and Fanghua, and have dinner with the legendary statistician/data scientist Bin Yu from UC Berkeley!
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Visiting the University of South Carolina this week, and my third PhD student Sijian Fan successfully defended his PhD dissertation, "Statistical Learning for Binary Data with Applications in Bioinformatics"! Excellent job! #professor #proudadvisor #universityofsouthcarolina
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
Excited for my PhD student Sijian's final defense this upcoming Wednesday! It's taking place at 11:00 am EST on Mar. 25 in LeConte 229 at the University of South Carolina! All who are free and on USC's campus at that time are welcome to join!
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Another new preprint! "BVSIMC: Bayesian variable selection-guided inductive matrix completion for improved and interpretable drug discovery" (with my PhD student Sijian Fan and our co-authors Liyan Xiong, Dayuan Wang, and Guoshuai Cai). Check it out 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2603.18957
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
New preprint of paper with my PhD student Sijian Fan: "BiSSLB: Binary Spike-and-Slab Lasso Biclustering"! We developed a biclustering method for binary data. It works really well on particularly noisy data with many 0's in 1-filled patterns or isolated 1's. arxiv.org/abs/2603.18378
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
I'll be in Columbia, SC next week starting on Wed. for my PhD student Sijian's final dissertation defense and for @uofscstatistics.bsky.social's 40th anniversary conference! Looking forward to seeing old colleagues at USC!
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
Yasss Amy Madigan! Well-deserved Oscar for her incredible performance as Gladys in "Weapons"!
001
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
I am pleased to share that my paper "VCBART: Bayesian Trees for Varying Coefficients" (with Sameer Deshpande, Cecilia Balocchi, Jennifer Sterling, and Jordan Weiss) has been published in the latest issue of Bayesian Analysis! Read it here: doi.org/10.1214/24-B...
doi.org
040
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
New blog post: "Seven Major Directions and Trends in Modern Statistics"! In this post, I summarize a few of the latest trends and prominent areas in the field of statistics. raybai.net/seven-major-...
raybai.net
Seven Major Directions and Trends in Modern Statistics – Ray Bai
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
I often explain deep learning and DGMs to non-experts & students who are not familiar but are interested in exploring this area. I find it's very helpful to start by framing linear regression and logistic regression as special cases of neural networks with a single output layer.
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Happening tomorrow at UMBC! Excited for my visit
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
(1/2) It's always a bit wild to me when something I learned many years ago comes up again. I wasn't sure I'd ever use differential equations again, but now with flow matching and diffusion models being the current state-of-the-art generative models, I'm reviewing a bit of ODEs.
130
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
A bit late but group pic from the Maryland Statistics Symposium at Brinn Mathematics Research Center this past Dec! Left to right: Jianhui Zhou, Gemma Moran, Lizhen Lin, Alden Green, Ray Bai, Anindya Roy, Cindy Rush, Yubai Yuan, Yun Yang, Yang Feng, Anderson Ye Zhang, Yanyuan Ma
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
I hope Sinners wins the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. Not just because it was an incredible movie, but because as a longtime horror aficionado, this would signal a broader appetite for horror & other genre-bending films in the academy (justice for Get Out!).
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
I'm giving a talk "Deep Generative Models for Statistical Problems: Methods, Computation, and Theory" at the UMBC Mathematics and Statistics Dept next Friday, Feb. 20 from 11:00 am-12:00 pm! Come join if you're in the area. mathstat.umbc.edu/events/event...
020
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
😍
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
This Super Bowl game is fairly boring, but absolutely loved the Halftime Show and the other musical performances! Green Day, Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny ❤️❤️
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
Congrats to my collaborator and former student Qingyang Liu (I taught him in 2 classes, served on his dissertation committee, and have co-authored several papers with him)! He will be joining @wakeforeststats.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor in July. 🥳Great department!
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
To anyone who is on the job market in Statistics this academic year: the George Mason University (GMU) Department of Statistics is hiring for open-rank, tenure-track or tenured positions! For full consideration, apply by January 14 at this link: tinyurl.com/6mjs8fye
tinyurl.com
Open-Rank, Tenured/Tenure-Track Statistics Faculty - Fairfax, VA, Virginia, United States
Department: Col of Engineering and Computing Classification: 9-month Instructional Faculty Job Category: Instructional Faculty Job Type: Full-Time Work Schedule: Full-time (1.0 FTE, 40 hrs/wk) Locatio...
013
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
So maddening what happened at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln magazine.amstat.org/blog/2026/01...
magazine.amstat.org
000
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
Our paper "Quantifying predictive uncertainty of aphasia severity in stroke patients with sparse heteroscedastic Bayesian high-dimensional regression" was published in the most recent issue of Computational Statistics. Read the paper here: doi.org/10.1007/s001...
010
Reposted by Ray Bai
Andrew Heiss @andrew.heiss.phd · 09/12/2025
Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future?
No.

Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course?
These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this).

However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner:

…to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability.

There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability.

The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma.

This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too):

Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.)

It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy.

As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible:

To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use.

Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled.

So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting.

You’ve got to learn first.
14336103
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Grading my final exams for undergrad probability & statistics, and this response to one of my questions seriously made me laugh out loud for minutes. Should I give Extra Credit for the student's response? "Bob, you are a fool amongst fools." 😂😂😂
Exam question: After you have explained 97% confidence to Bob, he responds, "I see. 97% is pretty good, but it could be great if we can make a 100% confidence interval." What is your response to this?

Student's answer: "Bob, you are a fool amongst fools. Truly, I pity you. A 100% confidence interval would be useful as it would give us a result of all real numbers. Taht's the only way to be 100% sure our true mean is in the interval; if every number could be included."
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Our R package for VCBART, or fitting BART-based varying coefficient models, is now available on CRAN! Useful for flexible regression modeling + can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in causal inference by specifying X and Z appropriately. Check it cran.r-project.org/web/packages...
cran.r-project.org
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Yes. "... the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process."
theatlantic.com
Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize
The skills that students will need in an age of automation are precisely those that are eroded by inserting AI into the educational process.
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
A sad day for the statistics community. U. of Nebraska Board of Regents voted to eliminate UNL's Department of Statistics.
linkedin.com
Yesterday was a very sad day for all of Statistics: The University of Nebraska Board of Regents voted 9-1 (with 2 abstentions) to eliminate its Department of Statistics (https://lnkd.in/gJzJ_yki)… | C...
Yesterday was a very sad day for all of Statistics: The University of Nebraska Board of Regents voted 9-1 (with 2 abstentions) to eliminate its Department of Statistics (https://lnkd.in/gJzJ_yki). The...
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
I'm at the Brin Mathematics Research Center today for the Maryland Statistics Symposium! Presenting my work on generative quantile regression w/ former PhD student Dr. Shijie Wang (U. South Carolina '24) and Dr. Minsuk Shin of Yonsei U. (published in JCGS last year).
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
The Maryland Statistical Symposium looks awesome! brinmrc.umd.edu/fall25-mss/ So honored to be invited to speak at this event alongside many outstanding researchers, some of whose work I have followed and admired for years!
brinmrc.umd.edu
Maryland Statistical Symposium | Brin Mathematics Research Center
011
Reposted by Ray Bai
Susan Vanderplas @srvanderplas.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
If you're following the #UNL #statistics saga (proposed for elimination based on bad stats), you might find the seminar we gave yesterday interesting... youtu.be/fUk2R0UYWpA It was weird to rail against someone for an hour, but strangely cathartic, and the #datavis seems to have been effective?
youtu.be
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Statistics seminar "The Metrics" on November 6, 2025
YouTube video by Chris Bilder
198
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Congrats to my student Leah Wood for successfully defending her Senior honors thesis "Spatiotemporal Modeling of Maternal Mortality in South Carolina 2018-2023"! Leah will pursue a Masters in Biostatistics next. This was on par with an excellent Masters thesis, tbh. Great job!
060
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Having a great time visiting Columbia, SC and catching up with old friends and coworkers! I will always be grateful to @uofscstatistics.bsky.social for helping me to launch my career!
030
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
nailed it!
010
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
One week till my trip to Columbia, SC to see my Honors student Leah defend her senior thesis! She did an excellent job on Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling of maternal mortality in South Carolina from 2018-2023. She coded up the model in Stan & R and produced some very nice maps!
031
Ray Bai @raybai07.bsky.social · 21/10/2025
Excited to give a talk at the Maryland Statistical Symposium at the Brin Mathematics Research Center this December! Looking forward to connecting with many outstanding statistics researchers in the DMV area and the mid-Atlantic region.
000