about

I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University in the Economics Department, where I work with Arun Chandrasekhar. 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 studied spectral methods for network analysis, causal inference, and causal inference on networks. During my PhD I also spent some time working on broom, a popular open-source R package in the tidyverse.

My curriculum vitae is available here. I also keep Google Scholar up to date, and you can find me on Bluesky at @alexpghayes.com.

Headshot of Alex

statistical consulting

At Stanford, I do some informal statistical consulting in the economics department, especially for grad students. Learn more.

what i’m doing now

As of April 2026, I’m putting my time towards:

  • Making data collection for in-person social networks cheaper and more efficient
  • Developing estimators for peer effects in noisy networks

working papers & pre-prints

  1. Estimating peer effects in noisy, low-rank networks via network smoothing (pdf). Alex Hayes and Keith Levin. April 10, 2026

  2. Minimax rates for the linear-in-means model reveal an identifiability-estimability gap. Alex Hayes and Keith Levin. arXiv. November 4, 2025.

publications

  1. 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

  2. Co-factor analysis of citation networks. Alex Hayes and Karl Rohe. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. 2024. post-print, arXiv, replication package, code

  3. 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

blog

In a hobbyist capacity, I also blog about statistics, programming, and data. Some posts I enjoyed writing: