I am very happy to have just heard that my thesis was selected for the 2025 Cramér Prize for best thesis in statistics defended in 2024! The thesis is about optimization and algorithms for sparse regression and I have previously written about it in a blog post here so I will not delve into details. But I am tremendously happy to have received this prize and want to thank my supervisors and committee for the prize.
The Cramér Society is a branch of the Swedish statistical society1. Each year they award a prize for the best PhD thesis in statistics (or mathematical statistics) defended in Sweden. The prize is named after Harald Cramér, a Swedish mathematician and statistician who made fundamental contributions to probability theory and statistics. He was a professor at Stockholm University from 1929 to 1958 and is particularly known for his work on mathematical statistics and probability theory.
The announcement can be found here but it is in Swedish, but I have translated it here:
The Cramér Prize is awarded annually for the best doctoral thesis to a person who defended their PhD in statistics/mathematical statistics during the past calendar year. This year, the prize goes to Johan Larsson, who defended his thesis at the Department of Statistics at Lund University. The motivation for the decision reads as follows:
In his thesis “Optimization and algorithms in sparse regression”, Johan Larsson tackles challenges that typically arise in the analysis of datasets with a large number of predictors and relatively few observations. The thesis thereby addresses problems that are central to contemporary statistical learning. Through the development of prescreening methods and optimization algorithms, Johan improves regression modeling using established regularization methods, such as LASSO and SLOPE, in high-dimensional contexts. The thesis, which contains both theoretical and applied parts, is very well written and, in addition to the developed statistical methods, also contributes software intended for objective comparison of different optimization methods.
Information about previous years’ prize winners can be found at: https://statistikframjandet.se/cramersallskapet/cramerpriset/
The thesis itself can be found here.
Footnotes
Statistikfrämjandet↩︎