He'll now have the opportunity to research those errors and find solutions that will be applicable to numerous other academic disciplines. Yang is striving to construct adaptive estimators by combining a collection of candidate procedures. What makes Yang's research more interesting and challenging is that he will deal with generally dependent random errors instead of independent or short-range dependent errors as is usually assumed. Long-range dependence refers to the case when the correlation between two errors remains strong even when two observations are far part either in space or in time. Long-range dependencies have been observed in many applied scientific disciplines including astronomy, physics, geoscience, hydrology and signal processing.
Statistical issues become much more complicated when long-range dependence happens.
The statistics professor has been researching this phenomenon since he came to Iowa State. My strength has been on the theoretical side of statistics. Many are not however. We want to work with other disciplines and discuss the issues that arise from this and provide appropriate statistical solutions. Yang plans on collaborating with Iowa State professors and research groups in some academic disciplines including atmospheric science, electrical engineering, and agronomy among other areas.