Contact information

Department of Statistics
Purdue University
office: MATH 550
email: martinrg AT purdue.edu

Background

My undergraduate degree is in math from Franklin College and my PhD is from the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. Before returning to Purdue to join the faculty in 2026, I spent ten years in the Department of Statistics at NC State University (old webpage is here) and, before that, five years in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at University of Illinois–Chicago.

Researchers.One

Harry Crane and I are co-founders of an online peer review and scholarly publication platform. For details, check out www.researchers.one and, in particular, our Researchers.One mission essay.

Current research interests

foundations of statistics & probability
generalized Bayes and Gibbs posterior distributions
high-dimensional problems
imprecise probability

News, presentations, etc

08/05/2026: Slides from my short-course on statistics, imprecise probabilities, and possibilistic inferential models at the 2026 SIPTA Summer School in Munich are here.

06/15/2025: Slides from my talk on no-prior Bayes reIMagined at the O'Bayes 2025 workshop are here.

03/11/2025: Slides from my talk on learning rate choice for Gibbs posteriors in the PostBayes Seminar are here, and a YouTube video recording is available here.

05/31/2024: Slides for my five-day short course on Topics in Statistical Inference at the Finnish Doctoral Education Network in Stochastics & Statistics are here.

Some links

OnePurdue
Overleaf
Purdue Library — MathSciNet
arXiv — statistics   probability   ML

Spring 2027 teaching

Stat 598 — Imprecise-Probabilistic Foundations of Statistics

Research-related updates

08/06/2026: The paper No-prior Bayes reIMagined, available here, has been accepted for publication in Statistical Science, with discussion. Here I explore the use of an inner probabilistic approximation of a provably valid possibilistic inferential model (IM) as an alternative to the standard default-prior Bayes solutions when no genuine prior information is available. This is a generalization of no-prior Bayes in the sense that, in cases where there is agreement on which default prior to use, my new solution agrees with that Bayesian solution; but my solution is different in other cases and it has stronger reliability properties.

04/01/2026: The paper, An efficient Monte Carlo method for valid prior-free possibilistic statistical inference, available here, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Inferential models (IMs) are powerful in that they offer reliable probabilistic inference without priors. But the IM's reliability guarantees require relaxing probabilistic to possibilistic, which creates computational challenges. Ideally, one could sample from a sort of "posterior distribution" that accurately represents the features of the possibilistic IM's output. This paper provides the details for such a strategy.

03/01/2026: My recent review paper on possibilistic IMs, here, was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

11/15/2025: The new paper, Valid and efficient possibilistic structure learning in Gaussian linear regression (with N. Singer and J. Williams), is now available here. This paper builds on the results in Part III by developing a framework in which necessarily incomplete knowledge about the model structure, e.g., sparsity, is encoded as a prior possibility distribution and then naturally incorporated into a possibilistic IM that offers valid structure learning.

10/01/2023: A new paper entitled Valid and efficient imprecise-probabilistic inference with partial priors, III. Marginalization is now available here and here. This is a follow-up to the investigations started in Parts I & II described below. What's new here is a focus on marginal inference. I propose a general marginalization strategy for possibilistic IMs, one that relies on profile likelihoods and can accommodate partial prior information if available. Validity properties are established and lots of illustrations are given.

11/29/2022: A new paper entitled Valid and efficient imprecise-probabilistic inference with partial priors, II. General framework is now available here and here. This is a follow-up to Part I mentioned below. What I didn't do in Part I was explain how valid and efficient imprecise-probabilistic inference with partial priors can be achieved. This new paper describes a valid and efficient inferential model (IM) construction, which turns out to be practical, conceptually simple, and not so much different from familiar things. Very strong properties are established for this IM and I show lots of examples.