about
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University in the Economics Department, where I work with Arun Chandrasekhar. My work thus far focuses on network analysis, causal inference and peer effects, which I mostly study using tools from multivariate statistics. In September 2026, I will join Oregon State University as an Assistant Professor in Statistics.
I completed my PhD in Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was co-advised by Keith Levin and Karl Rohe. During my PhD I spent some time working on broom, a popular open-source R package in the tidyverse, and I interned at Posit (formerly RStudio) and Facebook. Before grad school, I studied statistics at Rice University.
I keep Google Scholar up to date. My intermittently updated curriculum vitae is available here.
Ever since dissertating, board games have been my load-bearing hobby; I got into board games as a way to take my mind off work, and the habit has stuck. I particularly enjoy novelty and weird games; recently I tried psychedelic frog battle in space. In terms of more regular favorites, I’ve developed a taste for area control like Root, which allow me to indulge my inner competitive streak, and also co-ops such as Spirit Island, since I suppose team-work is also fun on occasion. I regularly host and attend large party games like Blood on the Clocktower, both for the thrill of finding hidden traitors and because I like to meet lots of new people.
Over my postdoc, I got back into being consistently active, and I put much of my open calendar towards weightlifting and group rides in the Santa Cruz mountains. I’m a big fan of playing recreational sports poorly. Once I move to Corvallis I’ll be on the lookout for pickup ultimate, pickleball players and fellow climbers; I’m pondering social dance as a next underdeveloped hobby. Together with some college friends, I’m learning about snow travel and mountaineering and we plan to explore some of the glaciated peaks in the PNW.
This last year I’ve been picking up the guitar at a local Palo Alto music school, child prodigies hammering out Beethoven in the next room as I struggle through classics such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Mary Had A Little Lamb. While I am not particularly artsy myself, I’ve recently enjoyed being dragged to arthouse movies, thrifting with friends who have better aesthetic sensibilities than myself, and reading speculative fiction. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle is a favorite.
In Oregon, I’d like to put down roots after my recent transient year as a postdoc. I’d especially like to connect with other junior faculty, and I’m hoping to get back in the habit of hosting dinner parties on a regular basis.
recent news
2026-07-29: I presented at New Researchers Conference 2026 about some recent work on estimating peer effects in noisy networks slide
2026-04-11: I presented on Spectral Estimation and Trait Selection for Aggregated Relational Data at Network Science in Economics 2026.
2026-04-09: I have a new working paper Estimating peer effects in noisy, low-rank networks via network smoothing with Keith Levin.
2025-12-15: I presented Minimax rates for the linear-in-means model reveal an identifiability-estimability gap virtually at CMStatistics 2025.
Material from older talks, presentations, posters, etc, can be found on my Github.
working papers & pre-prints
Estimating peer effects in noisy, low-rank networks via network smoothing. Alex Hayes and Keith Levin. arXiv. May 4, 2026. replication package
Minimax rates for the linear-in-means model reveal an identifiability-estimability gap. Alex Hayes and Keith Levin. arXiv. November 4, 2025. replication package
publications
Estimating network-mediated causal effects via principal components network regression. Alex Hayes, Mark M. Fredrickson, and Keith Levin. Journal of Machine Learning Research. 2025. replication package, code
Co-factor analysis of citation networks. Alex Hayes and Karl Rohe. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 2024. post-print, arXiv, replication package, code
Welcome to the tidyverse. Hadley Wickham, Mara Averick, Jennifer Bryan, Winston Chang, Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, Romain François, Garrett Grolemund, Alex Hayes, Lionel Henry, Jim Hester, Max Kuhn, Thomas Lin Pedersen, Evan Miller, Kirill Müller, David Robinson, Dana Paige Seidel, Vitalie Spinu, Kohske Takahashi, Davis Vaughan, Claus Wilke, Kara Woo, Hiroaki Yutani. Journal of Open Source Software. 2019. website
consulting
At Stanford, I do some informal statistical consulting in the economics department, especially for grad students. Learn more.
blog
In a hobbyist capacity, I also blog about statistics, programming, and data. Some posts I enjoyed writing: