Will Townes
@willtownes.bsky.social
Asst Prof at Carnegie Mellon Stats Dept interested in infectious disease, genomics, time series, and discrete stable distributions.
Tenure track job opportunity in our department! www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sta... #statistics
Open Position: Assistant Professor of Statistics & Data Science - Statistics & Data Science - Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences - Carnegie Mellon University
The Department of Statistics & Data Science invites applications for a tenure track position at the rank of Assistant Professor starting in Fall 2026.
www.cmu.edu
October 11, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Tenure track job opportunity in our department! www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sta... #statistics
Are you interested in concentration inequalities? Curious about whether there is a middle ground between subexponential and subgaussian bounds? Want to know how this all interacts with exponential tilting? Then check out my new paper recently published in TMLR: openreview.net/forum?id=BQB...
Exponential tilting of subweibull distributions
The class of subweibull distributions has recently been shown to generalize the important properties of subexponential and subgaussian random variables. We describe alternative characterizations of...
openreview.net
September 29, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Are you interested in concentration inequalities? Curious about whether there is a middle ground between subexponential and subgaussian bounds? Want to know how this all interacts with exponential tilting? Then check out my new paper recently published in TMLR: openreview.net/forum?id=BQB...
Thoughts on peer review: willtownes.github.io/blog/2025/08...
research profile and technical blog
willtownes.github.io
August 26, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Thoughts on peer review: willtownes.github.io/blog/2025/08...
Reposted by Will Townes
We have a new preprint 📝 *Post-sampling degradation of viral RNA in wastewater impacts the quality of PCR-based concentration estimates* Now on bioRxiv doi.org/10.1101/2025... with @tanjastadler.bsky.social, trj2.bsky.social, Christoph Ort and others
Post-sampling degradation of viral RNA in wastewater impacts the quality of PCR-based concentration estimates
Successful wastewater-based infectious disease surveillance programs depend on regular, reliable molecular detection of nucleic acids in municipal wastewater systems. This process is challenged by the...
doi.org
June 9, 2025 at 9:05 AM
We have a new preprint 📝 *Post-sampling degradation of viral RNA in wastewater impacts the quality of PCR-based concentration estimates* Now on bioRxiv doi.org/10.1101/2025... with @tanjastadler.bsky.social, trj2.bsky.social, Christoph Ort and others
Anyone else having trouble connecting to github due to a "potential security issue"?
July 21, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Anyone else having trouble connecting to github due to a "potential security issue"?
Benchmarking study of single-cell feature selection finds deviance to be an effective criterion: doi.org/10.1093/bib/... . Try it yourself with our ( @kstreet.bsky.social @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @davi1893.bsky.social ) scry package @bioconductor.bsky.social : doi.org/doi:10.18129... #genomics
Characterizing efficient feature selection for single-cell expression analysis
Abstract. Unsupervised feature selection is a critical step for efficient and accurate analysis of single-cell RNA-seq data. Previous benchmarks used two d
doi.org
July 1, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Benchmarking study of single-cell feature selection finds deviance to be an effective criterion: doi.org/10.1093/bib/... . Try it yourself with our ( @kstreet.bsky.social @stephaniehicks.bsky.social @davi1893.bsky.social ) scry package @bioconductor.bsky.social : doi.org/doi:10.18129... #genomics
Currently teaching data science to CMU students in beautiful Monteverde, Costa Rica! Students are working with real data from community partners: eg, permitting for new construction, flow rates from springs that supply drinking water, bell bird calls, and macroinvertebrate water quality indicators
June 3, 2025 at 9:51 PM
Currently teaching data science to CMU students in beautiful Monteverde, Costa Rica! Students are working with real data from community partners: eg, permitting for new construction, flow rates from springs that supply drinking water, bell bird calls, and macroinvertebrate water quality indicators
Overview of infectious disease forecasting and our Delphi research group @cmu.edu by Roni Rosenfeld: boxcast.tv/view/opening... (start at 20 min mark) delphi.cmu.edu
Opening Session AMIA 2025 Informatics Summit
boxcast.tv
March 14, 2025 at 6:17 PM
Overview of infectious disease forecasting and our Delphi research group @cmu.edu by Roni Rosenfeld: boxcast.tv/view/opening... (start at 20 min mark) delphi.cmu.edu
@epigenci.bsky.social makes a pretty convincing case for pseudobulk (as opposed to GLMMs) in multi-sample single cell studies here: doi.org/10.1093/bioi... . #bioinformatics
Pseudobulk with proper offsets has the same statistical properties as generalized linear mixed models in single-cell case-control studies
AbstractMotivation. Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs), such as the negative-binomial or Poisson linear mixed model, are widely applied to single-cell
doi.org
January 31, 2025 at 10:55 PM
@epigenci.bsky.social makes a pretty convincing case for pseudobulk (as opposed to GLMMs) in multi-sample single cell studies here: doi.org/10.1093/bioi... . #bioinformatics
Very proud of CMU Statistics & Data Science PhD candidate Gabrielle Thivierge who just passed her thesis proposal! "Methods for performing and evaluating infectious disease forecasting and nowcasting". Check out her first paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2408.12722
Does Spatial Information Improve Influenza Forecasting?
Seasonal influenza forecasting is critical for public health and individual decision making. We investigate whether the inclusion of data about influenza activity in neighboring states can improve poi...
arxiv.org
January 28, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Very proud of CMU Statistics & Data Science PhD candidate Gabrielle Thivierge who just passed her thesis proposal! "Methods for performing and evaluating infectious disease forecasting and nowcasting". Check out her first paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2408.12722
Cool #Rstats package for wastewater-based #epidemiology adrian-lison.github.io/EpiSewer/ #infectiousdisease
Estimate Epidemiological Parameters from Wastewater Measurements
What the package does (one paragraph).
adrian-lison.github.io
November 1, 2024 at 3:14 PM
Cool #Rstats package for wastewater-based #epidemiology adrian-lison.github.io/EpiSewer/ #infectiousdisease
Spatiotemporal variability of the pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) biomarker in #wastewater : a new preprint with CMU Stats PhD student Anna Rosengart and @wastewaterscan.bsky.social
collaborators arxiv.org/abs/2408.12012
collaborators arxiv.org/abs/2408.12012
Spatio-Temporal Variability of the Pepper Mild Mottle Virus...
Since the start of the coronavirus-19 pandemic, the use of wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) for disease surveillance has increased throughout the world. Because wastewater measurements are...
arxiv.org
August 29, 2024 at 3:33 PM
Spatiotemporal variability of the pepper mild mottle virus (PMMoV) biomarker in #wastewater : a new preprint with CMU Stats PhD student Anna Rosengart and @wastewaterscan.bsky.social
collaborators arxiv.org/abs/2408.12012
collaborators arxiv.org/abs/2408.12012
Mixed Poisson distributions are useful in modeling count data (eg negative binomial is Poisson mixed with gamma). But did you know the mixing distribution can actually include negative values? Read all about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2407.17614 #probability #statistics
Mixed Poisson families with real-valued mixing distributions
Mixed Poisson distributions provide a flexible approach to the analysis of count data with overdispersion, zero inflation, or heavy tails. Since the Poisson mean must be nonnegative, the mixing...
arxiv.org
July 29, 2024 at 2:50 PM
Mixed Poisson distributions are useful in modeling count data (eg negative binomial is Poisson mixed with gamma). But did you know the mixing distribution can actually include negative values? Read all about it here: arxiv.org/abs/2407.17614 #probability #statistics
New preprint: "Exponential tilting of subweibull random variables". arxiv.org/abs/2407.11386 Comments welcome! #probability #statistics
Exponential tilting of subweibull distributions
The class of subweibull distributions has recently been shown to generalize the important properties of subexponential and subgaussian random variables. We describe alternative characterizations...
arxiv.org
July 18, 2024 at 5:13 PM
New preprint: "Exponential tilting of subweibull random variables". arxiv.org/abs/2407.11386 Comments welcome! #probability #statistics
If I am interested in prediction intervals and am comfortable with a parametric model, what are the pros and cons of conformal prediction as opposed to bootstrapping?
March 18, 2024 at 7:18 PM
If I am interested in prediction intervals and am comfortable with a parametric model, what are the pros and cons of conformal prediction as opposed to bootstrapping?