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Chaitra H. Nagaraja |
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About Me
Research I am a fourth-year PhD student at The Wharton School, Department of Statistics. The bulk of my thesis work is on modeling housing prices of single homes under the supervision of Prof. Lawrence Brown. We have data from twenty US cities of all sizes and our mode combines the information in both repeat sales and single sales data. My master’s paper (MA ‘06) was about a hidden Markov model for classifying sleep states in mice. I presented this work at the JSM conference in Salt Lake City, UT in 2007 and it will be published in the conference proceedings (link to paper). I have also submitted a fun paper on the Gini index for the market capitalization of companies. The companies I examined were listed in the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400 and S&P SmallCap 600. In each case, I show that the Gini index can be modeled with a random walk (link to paper). In the summer of 2006, I was an intern at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. There, I worked on forecasting IBM revenue. My mentor, Dr. Wanli Min and I have continued examining the statistical issues arising from evaluating forecasts created by the aggregation of several models.
Why Statistics? My interest in statistics grew out of my undergraduate days at The University of Chicago (SB ‘04). I have a degree in Mathematics with Specialization in Economics from there. As required by my concentration, I had to take some statistics classes. I found the subject fascinating and ended up taking quite a few courses by the end of my four years in college. The best part of statistics is that it can be applied to everything. By pursuing a PhD in statistics, I could use my knowledge in any field from economics to medicine.
Teaching I hope to be an academic someday and part of academic life is teaching. I have enjoyed being a teaching fellow throughout my undergraduate and graduate years. I started at the University of Chicago holding recitations for pre-calculus and calculus courses in the math department. Here, I have assisted in introductory undergraduate courses and various MBA courses. In 2006, I won the Murray Award from my department for excellence in teaching.
Hobbies I’ve always loved to take pictures. This past summer I took a course in digital photography at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. I learned how to take better pictures and edit them as well. Photography is always more fun in exotic places and as a result, I enjoy travelling. To see some of my photographs, you can click on my picture at the top.
Contact Information
Links Wharton Statistics Department |
