Short Bio

Sebastian is Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Statistics and Information Science at the University of Geneva, where he is holding an Eccellenza grant. His research group works on:

• Extreme value theory and graphical models
• Extrapolation in machine learning
• AI weather forecasting
• Statistical climate science

Sebastian did his studies in Mathematics at University of Göttingen and UC Berkeley, and he obtained his PhD in 2013 at the University of Göttingen. He was then an Ambizione fellow at EPF Lausanne with Anthony Davison, and visiting professor at the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto from 2018–2019.

Memberships and Responsibilities

• Member of the Executive Committee of the Bernoulli Society as Membership Secretary (2019 – ).
• Member of the Research Section Committee (editorial board for JRSSB discussion papers) (2024 – ).
• Associate Editor of JRSSB (2021 – 2025), Extremes (2018 – ) and Scandinavian Journal of Statistics (2019 – 2022).
• Chair of the Scientific Committee for the Extreme Value Analysis Conference 2025 in Chapel Hill.
• Director of the Western Swiss Doctoral School in Statistics and Probability CUSO (2020 – 2023).
• Member of ISI (elected), Bernoulli Society, RSS, ASA.

News

• March 2025: New paper on "Extremes of structural causal models" (with N. Gnecco and F. Röttger) on arxiv.
• February 2025: Our paper on "Extremal graphical modeling with latent variables via convex optimization" (with A. Taeb) has been accepted in JMLR.
• October 2024: New paper on "Progression: an extrapolation principle for regression" (with G. Buriticá) on arxiv.
• October 2024: New paper on "Lévy graphical models" (with J. Ivanovs and J. D. Thøstesen) on arxiv.
• September 2024: I am honored to serve as the Chair of the Scientific Committee for the Extreme Value Analysis Conference 2025 taking place in Chapel Hill from June 23 to June 27, 2025!!
• June 2024: Our paper on "Statistical Inference for Hüsler-Reiss Graphical Models Through Matrix Completions" (with M. Hentschel and J. Segers) has been accepted in JASA, Theory and Methods. [arxiv]
• April 2024: Our paper on "Neural networks for extreme quantile regression with an application to forecasting of flood risk" (with O. Pasche) has been accepted in Annals of Applied Statistics. [arxiv]
• April 2024: New paper on "Validating Deep-Learning Weather Forecast Models on Recent High-Impact Extreme Events" (with O. Pasche, J. Wider, Z. Zhang and J. Zscheichler) on arxiv.
• March 2024: New paper on "Extremal graphical modeling with latent variables" (with A. Taeb) on arxiv.
• February 2024: We hosted a workshop and mini-courses on 'Causality in Extremes' at University of Geneva. Many thanks to everyone for making this such an interactive event!
• Feburary 2024: New review article on "Graphical models for multivariate extremes" (with M. Hentschel, M. Lalancette and F. Roettger) on arxiv.
• December 2023: Our paper on "Extremal random forests" (with N. Gnecco and E. M. Merga) has been accepted in JASA, Theory and Methods. [arxiv]
• October 2023: New paper on "Boosted control functions" (with N. Gnecco, J. Peters and N. Pfister) on arxiv.
• August 2023: Our paper on "Estimation and Inference of Extremal Quantile Treatment Effects for Heavy-Tailed Distributions" (with D. Deuber, J. Li, M. Maathuis) has been accepted in JASA, Theory and Methods.
• August 2023: Our paper on "The Effect of a Short Observational Record on the Statistics of Temperature Extremes" (with J. Zeder, S. Sippel, O. Pasche and E. Fischer) has been accepted in Geophysical Research Letters.
• June 2023: My PhD student Manuel Hentschel won the Best Student Paper Award at the EVA conference 2023 in Milano for our paper on matrix completions. Congratulations!!
• March 2023: I am honored to be invited to give the Gumbel lecture at the German Statistical Week 2023
• March 2023: Our paper "Total positivity in multivariate extremes" (with F. Röttger and P. Zwiernik) (arxiv) has been accepted in the Annals of Statistics.
• December 2022: Our paper "Rare-event simulation without variance reduction: an extreme value theory approach" (with Yuanlu Bai and Henry Lam) won the WSC PhD Colloquium INFORMS I-SIM Award 2022 at the IEEE Winter Simulation Conference. Congratulations Yuanlu!
• November 2022: New paper on "Graphical models for infinite measures with applications to extremes and Lévy processes" (with J. Ivanovs and K. Strokorb) on arxiv.
• November 2022: Update of the R package graphicalExtremes on CRAN. Now contains methods from recent papers on estimation and structure learning of extremal graphical models, and new data sets!
• October 2022: New paper on "Statistical inference for Hüsler-Reiss graphical models through matrix completions" (with M. Hentschel and J. Segers) on arxiv.
• October 2020: Gloria Buriticá is starting as postdoc within my SNSF Eccellenza grant. Welcome!
• August 2022: Our paper on "Structure learning for extremal tree models" (with S. Volgushev) (arxiv) is accepted in the JRSSB.
• We are organizing a CUSO/EPFL/ETHZ PhD school on "Statistical Machine Learning" from September 4-7, 2022, with speakers Gitta Kutyniok, Aaditya Ramdas, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber and Bin Yu MLSTATS2022.
• August 2022: New paper on "Neural networks for extreme quantile regression with an application to forecasting of flood risk" (with O. Pasche) on arxiv.
• June 2022: New paper on "Learning extremal graphical structures in high dimensions" (with M. Lalancette and S. Volgushev) on arxiv.
• May 2022: Our paper on "Modeling panels of extremes" (with D. Dupuis and L. Trapin) (arxiv) is accepted in the Annals of Applied Statistics.
• January 2022: New paper on "Extremal random forests" (with N. Gnecco and E.M. Terefe) on arxiv.
• December 2021: New paper on "Total positivity in multivariate extremes" (with F. Röttger and P. Zwiernik) on arxiv.
• October 2021: New paper on "Estimation and Inference of Extremal Quantile Treatment Effects for Heavy-Tailed Distributions" (with D. Deuber, J. Li, M. Maathuis) on arxiv.
• October 2021: New paper on "Modelling and simulating spatial extremes by combining extreme value theory with generative adversarial networks" (with Y. Boulaguiem, J, Zscheischler, E. Vignotto, K. van der Wiel) on arxiv.
• September 2021: Very honored to receive the Lambert Award 2021 of the Swiss Statistical Society.
• September 2021: I am now Associate Professor at the Research Center of Statistics at University of Geneva !
• June 2021: New paper on "Distributionally robust tail bounds based on Wasserstein distance and f-divergence" (with C. Birhila and M. Aigner) on arxiv.
• March 2021: New paper on "Gradient boosting for extreme quantile regression" (with J. Velthoen, C. Dombry, J.-J. Cai) on arxiv.
• January 2021: I am happy to join the Editorial Panel of JRSSB.
• December 2020: Our paper on "Rank-based Estimation under Asymptotic Dependence and Independence" (with M. Lalancette and S. Volgushev) has been accepted in the Annals of Statistics.
• December 2020: New paper on "Structure learning for extremal tree models" (with S. Volgushev) on arxiv.
• November 2020: Seminar talk at Columbia University, New York (virtual).
• October 2020: Simon Chatelain, Frank Röttger and Olivier Pasche are starting within my SNSF Eccellenza grant.
• September 2020: Our paper on "Causal discovery in heavy-tailed models" (with N. Gnecco, N. Meinshausen and J. Peters) has been accepted in the Annals of Statistics.
• September 2020: We are organizing a virtual Statistical Learning Workshop on September 18, 2020; program and registration on the website.
• September 2020: My PhD student Edossa Merga is visiting for 8 months from Hawassa University, Ethiopia. Funding from the Green Leaves Education Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
• June 2020: Our JRSSB discussion paper “Graphical models for extremes” is now published. Thanks to all the contributors to the discussion!
• June 2020: New paper on "Evaluating the dependence structure of compound precipitation and wind speed extremes" (with J. Zscheischler, P. Naveau, O. Martius and C. Raible) at Earth System Dynamics.
• May 2020: Review paper on "Sparse Structures for Multivariate Extremes" (with J. Ivanovs) on arxiv, to appear in Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.
• February 2020: Presenting our paper “Graphical models for extremes” (with A. Hitz) at the Royal Statistical Society discussion meeting in London, UK.
• December 2019: Sebastian is awarded an Eccellenza grant with the title "Graph structures, sparsity and high-dimensional inference for extremes" by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
• December 2019: Sebastian has been elected as member of the ISI.
• November 2019: The graphicalExtremes package is now on CRAN and .
• October 2019: Seminar talks at UQA Montreal, University of Waterloo, University of Guelph, University of Alberta and Environment and Climate Change Canada.
• October 2019: Plenary speaker at Climate Informatics Conference in Paris.
• September 2019: Lecturing at Training School on Statistical Modelling of Compound Events in Lake Como.
• September 2019: Three-month stay at The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto as a Fields Research Fellow.