Stats Program Comparison: UCLA vs University of Washington

[stathesh]

I recently got into both of these schools for their Statistics PhD programs. I am having a bit of trouble deciding between the two schools--I primarily am interested in Machine Learning and Bayesian Inference. I see myself mainly wanting to go to industry, and am struggling with discerning between the two program reputations. While I know UW has a higher ranking, I'm unsure how much of that really matters between two reputable schools like UCLA and UW. 

[bayessays]

Not even close, these programs are not in the same tier.  UW

[insert_name_here]

Absolutely UW. Anyone telling you it is even close, or a discussion at all, is lying.

[PLessPoint05]

But UCLA has very strong ML. Not sure how that is at UW. 

[trynagetby]

I'd add an opinion that on some things UCLA is stronger than UW, so I don't think its as one sided as the forum would say (this forums tends towards the standard statistics crowd). If you're interested in the more CSey side of Statistics (ML, Bayes Nets, HMM, Computer Vision, Generative modelings etc...) I think UCLA is stronger, especially now that Emily Fox left for Stanford.

Still for the record I voted for UW.

Edited April 7, 2021 by trynagetby

[Ryuk]

UW also has a stronger CS department that is very active in ML: https://www.cs.washington.edu/research/ml. 

I was accepted in both the stats and CS departments at UW, and they seemed to have a close relationship with a lot of joint appointments. I am also interested in ML and would have happily gone there if I hadn't received one or two other key offers. I didn't even apply to UCLA for reasons that others have stated above. 

[MLE]

51 minutes ago, Ryuk said:

they seemed to have a close relationship with a lot of joint appointments

I gotta disagree a bit here. There's two professors with joint appointments now (excluding Fox who is now at Stanford), one of which never is at the department and I think has a 0% appointment now, the other has like one CS student. Outside of that one professor, the interaction between the stat and cs departments is pretty non-existent. I don't believe there are any other active collaborations, seminar attendance is disjoint, and students in one department generally don't take courses in the other.

[Ryuk]

@MLE Fair point. I probably felt that there was a relationship because I was admitted to both and was interacting with them at the same time. I also wanted to work with Emily Fox, who seemed to bridge the gap.

That weakens the argument for UW if this student is very interested in ML.

[bayessays]

UW has Witten, Luedtke, Kakade, Harchaoui, lots of good people working on statistical ML.