Organizing a graduate program in statistics and data science raises many questions, offering a variety of opportunities while presenting a multitude of choices. The call for graduate programs in statistics and data science is overwhelming. How does it align with other (future) study programs at...

In this paper we investigate the effect of presmoothing on model selection. ChristobalChristobal et al. (1987) showed the beneficial effect of presmoothing for estimating the parameters in a linear regression model. Here, in a regression setting, we show that smoothing the response data prior to...

In this review, we give a general overview of latent variable models. We introduce the general model and discuss various inferential approaches. Afterward, we present several commonly applied special cases, including mixture or latent class models, as well as mixed models. We apply many of these...