Choosing between UNC and Michigan

[JZappa]

So while I've been accepted to several stats departments I believe my two best choices are UNC and Michigan. The problem I'm having is that I am currently an undergrad in the UNC stats department and so for all the typical reasons would like to go somewhere else for graduate school. That being said I'm very interested in probability and some of the more math oriented theory (stochastic calculus for example) and UNC has several fantastic professors for this sort of thing (Pipiras, Budhiraja, and Bhamidi) all of which I know very well and have done research with. Michigan doesn't quite seem to compare in terms of their probability group, most of their faculty on the web page anyway seem to be older and close to retirement or not as active (keep in mind I'm solely talking about probability). On the other hand I'm also interested in machine/statistical learning which Michigan does extremely well and which UNC doesn't do so much of (only 2 professors). Probability is still my primary interest but Michigan seems to have a better overall department in terms of breadth and depth of coverage into other areas. All that being said if anyone has an opinion on what to do in terms of picking between both of these schools I would greatly appreciate it.

[biostat_prof]

I'm not familiar with the probability faculty at either school, so I can't really comment on that. However, I can say that there are definitely more than two professors at UNC who do machine learning. Just off the top of my head, in the stat department there is Steve Marron, Andrew Nobel, and Yufeng Liu, and there are several others in the biostat department (e.g. Michael Kosorok, Donglin Zeng, and several junior faculty). I do tend to agree that there are more faculty working on machine learning at Michigan and that Michigan is probably a bit stronger overall in this area, but UNC is strong in machine learning as well.

[JZappa]

My bad I forgot about Professor Marron, I don't see him around too often. I was only counting the stats department and I am pretty certain those are the only 3 major machine learning people, although there might be a few others that dabble in it.