PhD Program Comparison: Wharton vs. Columbia vs. Chicago

[weezyF]

Pros cons of each? I don't know too much about the specialities of any of these schools... I know all of them are strong in mathematical finance. Are any of these programs known for machine learning at all? Also interested in causal inference. 

 

 

[StatsG0d]

I think Columbia got a huge boost when they hired David Blei, who's one of the most famous in the field. Unfortunately, I cannot really comment on the other two.

[ar_rf]

If you're considering these schools, I would suggest just waiting for visit days to determine their research interests. It will be much more accurate and enlightening than anything you hear here. That said, these are some (possibly very inaccurate) general impressions I've gotten from my research during applications and second-hand reports.

 

Despite being housed in a business school, UPenn Statistics is one of the most theoretical programs there is, almost to the point of absurdity. If you want to have any applied elements in your research, I would not necessarily recommend them. They are some of the best at what they do though, and if you are interested in theoretical work or math stat it's hard to beat them.

 

Columbia has always had a strong finance emphasis, more than maybe any other school. They did hire David Blei awawy from Princeton recently, who is somewhat of an up-and-coming star in machine learning. I am unsure whether this signals a new initiative or direction in ML, but it is interesting.

 

UChicago is a small but diverse department, with a couple people doing a bit of everything. They recently hired Lafferty away from CMU, who has been a fairly big name in Machine Learning for a while. (Blei was actually a post-doc under Lafferty at CMU, and I think many of the LDA extensions he did were with him.)

Edited February 11, 2015 by ar_rf

[weezyF]

when you say wharton is theoretical and some of the best at what they do, what do you mean exactly by theoretical? and what theoretical areas? 

 

thanks for your response. 

[ar_rf]

You can probably get an idea of their research profile by looking through their faculty pages. That description is mostly from what I've heard, I ruled them out early on from what I heard so I never really closely examined it.

[wine in coffee cups]

when you say wharton is theoretical and some of the best at what they do, what do you mean exactly by theoretical? and what theoretical areas? 

 

thanks for your response. 

Many of the faculty in that department specialize in very theoretical work related to misspecified models, post-selection inference, high-dimensional theory, and statistical learning theory. Collectively they have a lot of recent Annals of Statistics papers (top theory journal). The more applied people in the department work on Bayesian variable selection, hierarchical modeling, causal inference, experimental design, and genetics. I think of mathematical finance as being more in the probability, time series, stochastic process, extreme value theory, and copula literature, none of which I know much about. There's a couple faculty at Wharton whose work is adjacent to or in these areas but nothing like you might expect based on the knowledge that the department is housed in this fancy business school.  (Someone should pipe up if you think I'm mischaracterizing the program.) 

 

I perceive Columbia stat as the most finance-oriented of these three by a good margin, followed by Chicago stat and then Wharton stat. 

[cyberwulf]

If you want to do causal, you should look seriously at Penn. Dylan Small (mid-career) and Paul Rosenbaum (more senior) are both a big deal in that area.