Wooi Lim

I am a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at William Paterson University.

I received my master's in Statistics at University of Texas at El Paso, in 1988, and my Ph.D. in Statistics at University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1996.

Prior to joining William Paterson University, I was a visiting Professor at University of New Orleans. 1992-1996.

I have broad areas of interest in simulation, estimation and inferences. In each area, my work will continue to strive for a balance between excellence in the practice of statistics on important real-world problems and opportunities to improve. The use of statistics is expanding rapidly inside and outside of academia, with much of the growth in computationally intensive areas using large data sets from novel sources; we must
respond to this growth by developing effective and practical statistical tools and by developing new methods of teaching in and out of the classroom. This is an emerging type of scholarship which will become increasingly important. I'm excited to be able to
contribute such efforts, which extend beyond the classroom, beyond the Department, and beyond university.

My research on estimation focusses on the parameters of the exponential family. Why exponential family? The exponential family is the only family of distribution with finite-sized sufficient statistics, meaning that we can compress potential large amount of data into a constant-sized summary without loss of information.

The exponential family is the only family of distribution for which conjugate priors exist, which simplifies the computation of the posterior distribution. The expectation, Fisher information of the parameter as well as cumulant generating function can be obtained with differentiations rather than a more complicated method of using integrations. This is part of exponential family machinery that we can exploit in our work to make the computation and mathematics simpler

Professional Interests

Teaching.

Research on Estimation and Inferences of parameters

Other Interests

Lawn care, gardening, making compost

Languages (other than English)