I've recently been looking for top-of-the-line statisticians in a recruiting process for our company. Myself, I'm a Physics Engineering major. I gather that great mathematical statisticians have studied a bit different courses, and much more in depth.
When evaluating a candidate, are courses a good indicators of this person being excellent?
Preferably we're talking graduate or post-graduate level.
We're looking to fill roles of data miners, statistical modeling and data visualization. Thanks Chris, for the suggestion to clarify.
Best Answer
It really depends what your company is doing. Are you looking for machine learning experts? Data visualisation experts? Data mining experts?
When I interview statistics PhDs I like to ask them questions about linear regression, as I feel that anyone claiming to be an expert in statistics should at the very minimum be able to explain linear regression to me, and it's surprising how many can't.
Apart from that I'd consider it to be a good sign if they can have a good discussion about model selection/validation procedures, the concept of training and validation sets, cross-validation etc. If they know about classification algorithms (k-NN, SVM, decision trees etc) and can discuss their strengths/weaknesses that's even better.
I find that the particular courses they've studied are rarely a good indicator, and are only really useful for steering the discussion in the interview. If they're claiming to have studied something on their CV, I expect them to be able to discuss it at length.