Personal photo

Serge B. Provost is a full professor in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Western Ontario.^[1]

He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics and Statistics from McGill University in 1984. His supervisor was Emeritus Professor Arak M. Mathai, which, according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, makes him a mathematical descendant of John Tukey, Carl Jacobi, Desiderius Erasmus, Nicolaus Copernicus and Friedrich Leibniz.

According to ResearchGate[1], Professor Provost's Research Interest Score is higher than that of 95% of its members; as of January 2025, his work has been cited nearly 2,000 times and has garnered some 57,000 'Reads'. As can be seen from the articles listed therein, his scholarly contributions encompass multiple fields of research, including multivariate analysis, orthogonal series expansions, statistical modelling, complex and matrix-variate distribution theory, computational statistics and pure mathematics; for instance, they involve applications in biostatistics, financial modelling, actuarial science, operations research, time series analysis, data visualization, geometric probability, microarray experimentation, optics, life testing, environmental studies, thermodynamics, and machine learning.  He has authored or co-authored approximately 140 articles. As well, he is the co-author of four books. Parenthetically, the website of the latest one[2] which is 'Open Access', has been accessed 90,000 times between October 2022 and December 2024.

Among other distinctions, Professor Provost is a Fellow and Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society. He is the recipient of three teaching award (2005, 2008, 2010). Along with one of his doctoral students, he received the 1996 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for an innovative paper on the distribution of the serial correlation coefficient. He became an Associate of the Society of Actuaries in 1980.

He has so far supervised or co-supervised 17 Ph.D. students and 40 Master's students. Incidentally, he is the director of the S. B. Provost Lab of Multivariate Data Analytics. He also chaired the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada's Scholarship and Fellowship Grant Selection Committee from July 2009 to June 2010. Moreover, Professor Provost has held several editorial positions over the years.

He participated in dozens of international conferences, often on invitation, and his travels have taken him to all seven continents. Professor Provost visited the following institutions, among others, as an invited scholar:  Gachon University, Korea; Florida International University, U.S.; the Centre for Mathematical Studies, India; the National Institute for the Development of Administration, Thailand; the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the University of French Polynesia. He also paid research visits to the University of Magallanes, Kathmandu University and Harvard University, to name a few.

• Mathai, A. M.; Provost, Serge B.; Hayakawa, Takesi (1995). Bilinear Forms and Zonal Polynomials. New York, NY: Springer New York. doi:10.1007/978-1-4612-4242-0_2. ISBN 978-1-4612-4242-0. OCLC 852789931.^[2]
• Mathai, A. M.; Provost, Serge B.; Haubold, H.J. (2022). Multivariate statistical analysis in the real and complex domains. Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-95864-0_13. ISBN 978-3-030-95864-0. OCLC 1347381548.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Mathai, A. M.; Provost, Serge B. (1992). Quadratic forms in random variables : theory and applications. New York: M. Dekker. ISBN 0-8247-8691-2. OCLC 24953650.^[3]
• Saboor, Abdus; Provost, Serge B.; Ahmad, Munir (2010). Univariate and Bivariate Gamma-Type Distributions. Lambert Academic Publishing. ISBN 978-3838345536.

• Provost, Serge B.; Ha, Hyung-Tae (2015-06-29). "Distribution approximation and modelling via orthogonal polynomial sequences". Statistics: 1–17. doi:10.1080/02331888.2015.1053809. ISSN 0233-1888.
• Jiang, Min; Provost, Serge B. (2014-03-04). "A hybrid bandwidth selection methodology for kernel density estimation". Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. 84 (3): 614–627. doi:10.1080/00949655.2012.721366. ISSN 0094-9655.
• Mathai, Arak M.; Provost, Serge B. (2022-07-04). "On the singular gamma, Wishart, and beta matrix-variate density functions". Canadian Journal of Statistics. 50 (4): 1143–1165. doi:10.1002/cjs.11710. ISSN 0319-5724.
• Provost, Serge B.; Yang, Zhaoqi; Ahmed, S. Ejaz (June 2022). "Securing Density Estimates via Smooth Moment-Based Empirical Distribution Function Approximants". Journal of the Indian Society for Probability and Statistics. 23 (1): 1–18. doi:10.1007/s41096-022-00119-4. ISSN 2364-9569.
• Provost, Serge B. and Rudiuk, Edmund M.  (1995). The Sampling Distribution of the Serial Correlation Coefficient American Journal of Mathematical and Management Sciences 15 (1-2), 57-81. https://doi.org/10.1080/01966324.1995.10737387