Faculty — Andrew O.Finley

Assistant Professor, Forest Management and Modeling

Ph.D. Natural Resources Science and Management, University of Minnesota, 2007
M.S. Statistics, University of Minnesota, 2007
M.S. Forestry, University of Massachusetts, 2003
B.S. Forestry, The Pennsylvania State University, 2000

Contact Information

210E Natural Resources Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1222
Phone: 517-432-7219
Fax: (517) 432-1143
Email: finleya@msu.edu
Lab Webpage: http://blue.for.msu.edu

Research Interests

My general interests lie in the fields of natural resource inventory, Bayesian statistics, spatial statistics, and statistical computing. In terms of application areas, my research focuses on spatio-temporal modeling of important economic and ecological forest attributes, indices of biodiversity, and ecological systems. A central theme in my research is the use of hierarchical models to integrate information from disparate sources to improve inference and predictions.

Research Opportunities for Graduate Students

The Department of Forestry and the Department of Geography offer excellent environments and opportunities for graduate study. Funding is available from University Fellowships, research assistantships from externally funded projects, and teaching assistants. I encourage prospective graduate students interested in joining my lab group to contact me directly.

Degree Options for Graduate Student

M.S. or Ph.D. in Forestry
M.S. or Ph.D. in Geography

Selected Publications

Finley, A.O. and R.E. McRoberts. (In press) Efficient k-nearest neighbor searches for multi-source forest attribute mapping. Remote Sensing of Environment.

Finley, A.O., S. Banerjee, A.R. Ek, and R.E. McRoberts. (In press) Bayesian multivariate process modeling for prediction of forest attributes. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics.

Finley, A.O., S. Banerjee, and R.E. McRoberts. (In press) A Bayesian approach to quantifying uncertainty in multi-source forest area estimates. Environmental and Ecological Statistics.

Finley, A.O., S. Banerjee, and B.P. Carlin. (2007) spBayes: A program for multivariate point-referenced spatial modeling. Journal of Statistical Software. 19:4.

Banerjee, S. and A.O. Finley. (In press) Bayesian multiresolution modeling of spatially replicated data. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference.

Finley, A.O., R.E. McRoberts, and A.R. Ek. (2006) Applying an efficient k-nearest neighbor search to forest attribute imputation. Forest Science. 52:130-135.

Finley, A.O., D.B. Kittredge, T.H. Stevens, C.M. Schweik, and D. Dennis. (2006) Possibilities for cross-boundary cooperation in a landscape dominated by private ownership: a case study from Massachusetts. Forest Science. 52:10-22.

Finley, A.O. and D.B. Kittredge. (2006) Thoreau, Muir, and Jane Doe: different types of private forest owners need different kinds of forest management. Northern Journal of Applied Forestry. 23:27-34.

Haapanen, R., A.R. Ek, M.E. Bauer, and A.O. Finley. (2004) Delineation of forest/non-forest land-use classes using k-nearest neighbor classification. Remote Sensing of Environment. 89:265-271.

Kittredge, D.B., A.O. Finley, and D.R. Foster. (2003) Timber harvesting as ongoing disturbance in a landscape of diverse ownership. Forest Ecology and Management. 180:425-442.

Selected Manuscript (In review)

Finley, A.O., S. Banerjee, and P. Waldmann. (In review) Computationally feasible block Gibbs sampling of additive and non-additive genetic parameters in pedigrees. Genetics.

Finley, A.O., S. Banerjee, P. Waldmann, and T. Ericsson. (In review) Hierarchical spatial modeling of additive and dominance genetic variance for large spatial trial datasets. Biometrics.

Nicholas L.C. and A.O, Finley. (In review) yaImpute: An R package for kNN Imputation. Journal of Statistical Software.

Banerjee, S., A.E. Gelfand, A.O. Finley, and H. Sang. (In review) Modeling large multivariate spatial data sets with Gaussian predictive processes. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B.