Haavard Rue

May 2026

• 

  INLA Team Publishes New Book on Joint Survival and Longitudinal Modelling

  1 min read · Tue, May 5 2026

  News

  INLA Longitudinal Models Survival analysis

  We are thrilled to announce the publication of our latest book, a comprehensive guide to fitting complex Bayesian survival, longitudinal, and joint models using the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations (INLA) methodology. This highly anticipated release represents a major milestone for our team, offering a powerful, computationally efficient alternative to traditional MCMC methods for researchers around the globe.

April 2026

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  The R-INLA Project Launches Revamped Website

  1 min read · Wed, Apr 8 2026

  News

  R-INLA INLA

  For researchers pushing the boundaries of scalable statistical modeling, the R-INLA framework is a cornerstone of daily computational work. We are excited to share that the official R-INLA project has officially launched a brand-new, modernized website.

March 2026

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  BAYESCOMP Group Secures CRG Funding to Revolutionize Latent Variable Modeling

  2 min read · Tue, Mar 10 2026

  Awards

  award CRG Bayesian and computational Statistics Latent variable models Structural equation models Item Response Theory Confirmatory factor analysis

  The KAUST Bayesian Computational Statistics and Modeling (BAYESCOMP) Research Group is pleased to announce the award of a 2025 Competitive Research Grant (CRG) for the project: "Advancing scalable Bayesian methods for latent variable modelling." The project is funded at USD $900,000 for 36 months, with the research program officially commencing in April 2026.

November 2025

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  Equatorial Coral Reefs May Offer Natural Refuge During Marine Heatwaves

  1 min read · Wed, Nov 19 2025

  Research in Focus

  Bayesian computational statistics coral bleaching climate change

  A new study published in Global Change Biology reports that equatorial reefs in the Coral Triangle may act as rare natural refugia for corals during marine heatwaves.
• 

  KAUST leads Arab nations in global research influence with 16 scientists on Clarivate 2025 list

  1 min read · Wed, Nov 12 2025

  News Clip Awards News

  The 2025 list of Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers includes 16 researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), including 15 of its 185 faculty. This number surpasses last year's 14, demonstrating the continued and rising research excellence at the University. It also represents 59% of Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers in Saudi Arabia and most at any institute among Arab nations. 2025 Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers are considered the world’s most influential and whose academic publications rank in the top 1% of cited research papers between the years 2014 and

October 2025

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  Checking your assumptions

  1 min read · Thu, Oct 30 2025

  News Clip News

  A workflow-based method to check the suitability of assumptions in complex statistical models gives researchers an efficient tool for selecting the right model.

October 2023

• 

  Real-time modeling a step closer to reality

  2 min read · Thu, Oct 26 2023

  News

  An efficiency upgrade for an already fast approximation method enables accurate near-real-time modeling of complex systems and large datasets.

September 2023

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  Penalizing complexity for better stats

  2 min read · Mon, Sep 11 2023

  News

  Applying a penalty for increasing complexity provides better control over flexible statistical models.

February 2023

• 

  Two-part joint models using INLA published in the Biometrical Journal

  1 min read · Mon, Feb 27 2023

  News

  Two-part joint models for a longitudinal semicontinuous biomarker and a terminal event have been recently introduced based on frequentist estimation. The biomarker distribution is decomposed into a probability of positive value and the expected value among positive values. Shared random effects can represent the association structure between the biomarker and the terminal event. The computational burden increases compared to standard joint models with a single regression model for the biomarker. In this context, the frequentist estimation implemented in the R package frailtypack can be
• 

  Prof. Sorbye and Dr. Moores visit the BayesComp group

  1 min read · Tue, Feb 21 2023

  News

  Dr. Matt Moores from the University of Wollongong in Australia and Prof. Sigrunn Sorbye from the Arctic University of Norway, are visiting the BayesComp group to continue collaborative projects.

January 2023

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  INLA for interval-censored data

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  A book chapter based on the use of INLA for efficient Bayesian modeling of interval-censored survival and reliability data has been published in the book Emerging Topics in Modeling Interval-Censored Survival Data published by Springer. This shows practitioners how to apply the INLA framework to produce insights into their data.
• 

  INLA for HPC

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Members of the BayesComp group together with collaborators from UCI developed parallelization strategies for the methodology of integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA). The approach makes use of nested thread-level parallelism, a parallel line search procedure using robust regression in INLA’s optimization phase and the state-of-the-art sparse linear solver PARDISO. This provides a way to flexibly utilize the power of today’s multi-core architectures. The work is integrated in the current version of the open-source R-INLA package, making its improved performance conveniently available
• 

  INLA course at UPNA

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Elias Krainski presented a course on Bayesian spatial and spatio-temporal modeling with R-INLA at the Public University of Navarre (UPNA) in Pamplona, Spain during 25-27 January 2023.
• 

  INLA workshop at University of Glasgow

  1 min read · Tue, Jan 31 2023

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Elias Krainski presented a workshop for INLA users and developers titled "INLA: past, present and future" at the University of Glasgow during 18-19 January.
• 

  Two new papers in Extremes

  1 min read · Thu, Jan 19 2023

  Spotlight News

  Two new papers accepted to the Extremes Special Issue on the EVA Data Competition: Zhang, Z., Krainski, E., Zhong, P., Rue, H., and Huser, R. (2023+), Joint modeling and prediction of massive Spatio-temporal wildfire count and burnt area data with the INLA-SPDE approach, Extremes, to appear [ PDF preprint]. Cisneros, D., Gong, Y., Yadav, R., Hazra, A., and Huser, R. (2022+), A combined statistical and machine learning approach for spatial prediction of extreme wildfire frequencies and sizes, Extremes, to appear [ PDF preprint].

November 2022

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  Professor Huser receives the Abdel El-Shaarawi Early Investigator Award 2022

  2 min read · Sun, Nov 20 2022

  Awards News

  KAUST Associate Professor of Statistics Raphaël Huser has been awarded the Abdel El-Shaarawi Early Investigator (AEEI) Award 2022 from The International Environmetrics Society (TIES), an association of the International Statistical Institute (ISI).

August 2022

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  KAUST Ph.D. candidate wins ISBA-BayesComp poster award at the International Society for Bayesian Analysis 2022

  2 min read · Sun, Aug 21 2022

  News

  Bayesian computational statistics

  Esmail Abdul Fattah, a KAUST Ph.D. candidate in statistics, won a poster award in the "junior-BayesComp-ISBA" category at the 30th meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA 2022) held from June 26 to July 1 in Montreal, Canada.

June 2022

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  INLA course at Bordeaux population health center

  1 min read · Wed, Jun 15 2022

  News

  Some members of the INLA team presented an INLA short course to the Biostatistics group at the Bordeaux population health center of INSERM and the University of Bordeaux. The content was tailored for biostatistics and public health applications, to avail INLA as a tool for fast Bayesian inference of applicable statistical models.

May 2022

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  New paper accepted in Environmetrics - 2022

  1 min read · Thu, May 19 2022

  Spotlight News

  Statistics of extremes

  New paper accepted: Castro-Camilo, D., Huser, R., and Rue, H. (2022+), Practical strategies for GEV-based regression models for extremes, Environmetrics, to appear [ PDF preprint]

March 2021

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  Rue honored by Royal Statistical Society

  1 min read · Wed, Mar 3 2021

  Spotlight News

  ​KAUST Professor of Statistics Håvard Rue has been honored by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) for his "substantial and significant contributions in the area of efficient and scalable computational techniques for the data analysts' toolbox."

December 2020

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  KAUST researchers rank in top 1% of cited work worldwide

  1 min read · Wed, Dec 23 2020

  News

  Fifteen KAUST faculty members and one postdoctoral researcher rank among the 2020 Highly Cited Researchers from around the world, according to Clarivate Web of Science Group, a global leader of academic research analytics. The list names individuals whose work accounts for the top 1% of research cited worldwide.

October 2020

• 

  Today we celebrate World Statistics Day!

  1 min read · Tue, Oct 20 2020

  News

  statistics healthcare

  Let’s discover the world of the statisticians at KAUST and be ready to be amazed by their cutting-edge research!
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue presents at Advancing knowledge about spatial modeling, infectious diseases, environment and health 2020

  1 min read · Mon, Oct 5 2020

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was invited as a keynote speaker to the "Advancing knowledge about spatial modeling, infectious diseases, environment and health" virtual workshop organized by the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, during June 2020.
• 

  Prof. Rue and Dr. van Niekerk present R-INLA workshop at ICoMCoS2020

  1 min read · Mon, Oct 5 2020

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was invited as a keynote speaker at the International Conference on Mathematics, Computational Sciences, and Statistics (ICoMCoS) 2020, organized by Universitas Airlangga in Indonesia during 29-30 September. Together with Dr. Janet van Niekerk, they presented a virtual workshop on R-INLA and its applications.

January 2020

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  Prof. Rue at CMStatistics, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Imperial College

  1 min read · Sun, Jan 5 2020

  News

  Prof. Rue is in London for a few days in December for the 12th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics (CMStatistics 2019), and a visit to research collaborators at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, as well as some collaborators at Imperial College.

November 2019

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  Prof. Haavard Rue is one of the World's most highly cited researchers

  1 min read · Mon, Nov 25 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue has been acknowledged as one of the World's most highly cited researchers on the Highly Cited Researchers 2019 list from the Web of Science Group.
• 

  Visiting researchers of the BayesComp group

  1 min read · Thu, Nov 7 2019

  News

  Dr. Anna Freni-Sterrantino from Imperial College in London is visiting during 2-23 November, Dr. Fatima Batool from University College in Lis visiting during 16-26 November and Dr. Erica Ponzi from the University of Oslo in Norway is visiting during 9-23 November. The BayesComp group is excited to (further) collaborate with these visiting researchers.

September 2019

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  Prof. Haavard Rue visits OsloMet

  1 min read · Tue, Sep 24 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue presented a seminar at OsloMet's Artificial Intelligence Group on 23 September. He also continued some existing collaboration.
• 

  BayesComp members at the IWSM 2019 in Guimaraes, Portugal

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue, Dr. Haakon Bakka and Dr. Janet van Niekerk attended and presented at the International Workshop on Statistical Modelling in July 2019. This workshop brings together experts and young researchers to discuss and collaborate on challenges in statistical modelling.
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue examines PhD at Oxford University

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was at Oxford in May 2019 for a research visit and to examine a PhD thesis of one of Prof. Chris Holmes’ students.
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue visits Carlos III University of Madrid

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue visited the Carlos III University in Madrid, Spain during May 2019 to give a seminar at the Department of Statistics and to collaborate on ongoing projects.
• 

  Prof. Haavard Rue presents at the Swiss Numerics Day 2019

  1 min read · Sun, Sep 8 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue was an invited speaker at the Swiss Numerics Day 2019 meeting in May 2019 at USI Lugano, Switzerland. He contributed to this meeting with a talk about the role and importance of sparse matrices in statistics. He also collaborated with Prof Olaf Schenk, which is the brain behind the PARDISO sparse matrix library in R, and others.
• 

  BayesComp members present space-time seminar in Cape Town

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Haakon Bakka presented a seminar on spatio-temporal modeling at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in June 2019.
• 

  BayesComp group present INLA course in South Africa

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue, Dr. Haakon Bakka and Dr. Janet van Niekerk presented a four day long INLA training course at the University of South Africa in Florida, Johannesburg during June 2019. The course was designed to impact young staff and PhD students from previously disadvantaged universities in South Africa. The audience gained a lot of skills during this course and the course was very well received.
• 

  BayesComp members at O'Bayes 2019

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Haakon Bakka attended the O'Bayes 2019 conference at University of Warwick, with about 100 participants. Our work were very well recieved [ https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2019/06/30/obayes-19-1-snapshots/], and the concept of Penalized complexity priors seems to be accepted in the community. Dr. Haakon Bakka presented a poster and Prof. Haavard Rue delivered one of the invited talks.
• 

  BayesComp members present in the European Course in Advanced Statistics on Statistical Analysis for Space-Time Data (ECAS2019)

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue and Dr. Haakon Bakka presented a part of the European Course in Advanced Statistics on Statistical Analysis for Space-Time Data (ECAS2019), organized by the Portuguese Statistical Society (SPE) and the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operational Research (SEIO). The course took place in Lisbon, Portugal, on July 15th-17th, 2019. The ECAS courses are intended to achieve postgraduate training in special areas of statistics for (especially 1st year) PhD students, researchers, teachers at universities, and professionals interested in the application of new statistical methods
• 

  BayesComp members at the ISI's WSC 2019 in Kuala Lumpur

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 4 2019

  News

  Prof. Haavard Rue, Dr. Haakon Bakka and Dr. Janet van Niekerk attended the 62 nd World Statistics Congress of the ISI in Kuala Lumpur on 18-23 August 2019 where they presented in invited and contributed paper sessions. This bi-annual meeting brings together major role players from academia, government offices and industry partners.

August 2019

• 

  R-INLA used to accurately predict forest fires in Portugal

  1 min read · Wed, Aug 28 2019

  News

  Professors Maria Antónia da Conceição Abrantes Amaral Turkman and Kamil Feridum Turkman, from the University of Lisbon used the INLA methodology and specifically SPDE's (using R-INLA), to do the official risk assessment for forest fire prediction in Portugal for 2018. The prediction s turned out to be very accurate and a new study is on the way for updating the predictions for 2020 with more detailed data.

June 2019

• 

  New paper accepted in JABES

  1 min read · Tue, Jun 25 2019

  Spotlight News

  extreme weather spatio-temporal statistics Statistics of extremes

  New accepted paper: Castro-Camilo, D., Huser, R., and Rue, H. (2019+), A spliced Gamma-generalized Pareto model for short-term extreme wind speed probabilistic forecasting, Journal of Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Statistics, to appear [ PDF preprint]

February 2019

• 

  Advanced Spatial Modeling with Stochastic Partial Differential Equations Using R and INLA book

  1 min read · Tue, Feb 19 2019

  News

  INLA statistics xstat research highlights

  Modeling spatial and spatio-temporal continuous processes is an important and challenging problem in spatial statistics. Advanced Spatial Modeling with Stochastic Partial Differential Equations Using R and INLA describes in detail the stochastic partial differential equations (SPDE) approach for modeling continuous spatial processes with a Matérn covariance, which has been implemented using the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) in the R-INLA package. Key concepts about modeling spatial processes and the SPDE approach are explained with examples using simulated data and real

November 2018

• 

  2018 Workshop on Statistics and Data Science

  1 min read · Sat, Nov 10 2018

  News

  statistics data analysis

  The Statistics Program at KAUST is proud to host the 2018 Workshop on Statistics and Data Science. This workshop gathers the leading experts on statistical data science to discuss the current needs, challenges and opportunities of modeling massive and high dimensional data, predicting complex biological and physical processes. The workshop will run from November 12-14. Talks and posters presentations will take place in Auditorium 0215 (between Buildings 4 & 5). Details on the workshop (speakers, abstracts and schedule) can be found here.

September 2018

• 

  Zaid Sawlan successfully defended his PhD thesis

  3 min read · Thu, Sep 27 2018

  News

  On September 26th, 2018, Zaid Sawlan successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled "Statistical analysis and Bayesian methods for fatigue life prediction and inverse problems in linear time-dependent PDEs with uncertainties."
• Solving real-world problems

  1 min read · Wed, Sep 19 2018

  News

  statistics Bayesian computational statistics healthcare ecology

  A tool developed by Håvard Rue has transformed data analysis, interpretation and communication. It has been applied broadly: from modeling the spread of infectious diseases to mapping fish stocks.

November 2017

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  2017 Workshop Modern Statistics for Complex Data Structures

  1 min read · Sun, Nov 12 2017

  Spotlight News

  statistics

  2017 Workshop Modern Statistics for Complex Data Structures

October 2015

• 

  2015 Workshop on Computational Space-Time Statistics

  1 min read · Sun, Oct 4 2015

  Spotlight News

  statistics spatio-temporal statistics Bayesian computational statistics

  Organizers : Prof. Marc G. Genton , Chair of Spatio-Temporal Statistics and Data Science Group Prof. Raphael Huser, Chair of Extreme Statistics Group​ Prof. Ying Sun​, Chair of Environmental Statistics Group Confirmed speakers: Prof. Sudipto Banerjee, University of California Los Angeles, USA Prof. Souhaib Ben Taieb, Monash University, Australia Prof. Stefano Castruccio, Newcastle University, UK Prof. Miguel de Carvalho, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile,​ Chile Prof. Clément Dombry, University of Franche-Comté , France Prof. Xuming He, University of Michigan, USA Prof. Hsin-Cheng Huang