Rate My Professor Seongbaek Yi

Seongbaek Yi is a professor and department head in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Pukyong National University, having joined the faculty as an assistant professor in March 1999, promoted to associate professor in April 2005, and to full professor in April 2010. He earned his Ph.D. in Statistics from Texas A&M University in 1996 (advisor: Jeffrey Hart), M.S. in Statistics from Yonsei University in 1989, and B.A. in Economics from the same university in 1985. Yi has held visiting professor positions at Texas A&M University from January 2013 to January 2014 and January 2020 to January 2021, and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from August 2006 to August 2007. Additionally, he serves as emeritus professor.

His research interests encompass theoretical statistics, Bayesian inference, statistical education, statistical inference, and time series analysis. Yi has published extensively, with key papers including "A comparison of normality testing methods by empirical power and distribution of P-values" co-authored with T. Uhm (Communications in Statistics - Simulation and Computation, 2021), "Predicting hearing recovery following treatment of idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss with machine learning models" with T. Uhm et al. (American Journal of Otolaryngology, 2021), "Correct interpretation of kurtosis" with T. Uhm (Journal of the Korean Data & Information Science Society, 2019), "Approximation of π by financial historical data" with D.H. Jang (Journal of the Korean Data & Information Science Society, 2017), "The information value of credit rating withdrawals" with L. Fairchild and S. Yoon (International Journal of Bonds and Derivatives, 2016), and "Frequentist nonparametric goodness-of-fit tests via marginal likelihood ratios" with J. Hart and T. Choi (Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 2016). He co-authored the textbook "Elementary Statistics with R," third edition (Free Academy, 2019). Yi has assumed prominent roles such as Vice President of the Korean Statistical Society since 2021, Vice President of the Korean Data and Information Science Society from 2019 to 2020, information director for the latter society from 2017 to 2018, and editorial committee member for the Korean Society for Applied Statistics. He was honored as one of the 50 Most Distinguished Professors in Pukyong National University's 100-year history for his dedication to statistical theory education and international research presentations.