Dr. Nora Würz (Lecturer)

Room F21/00.78
Feldkirchenstraße 21
96045 Bamberg

Phone: 0951 863-2631

E-Mail

Consultation hours: by appointment

Research Fields

• Small Area Estimation
• Machine learning methods in the context of small-area estimation
• Tabular foundations models for estimating small-scale indicators

Brief Biography

Nora Würz has been working at the Chair of Statistics and Econometrics since 2022, where she is involved in teaching and research as well as in BACES. Prior to this, she spent five years as a research assistant at the fu:stat statistical consultancy unit of the Chair of Applied Statistics at Freie Universität Berlin, where she was in charge of administration.

She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Integrated Life Sciences in 2015 at Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. She then studied statistics on the joint Master’s programme run by the universities in Berlin, graduating with a Master’s degree in 2017. 

From 2017 to 2022, Nora Würz completed her PhD at the Chair of Applied Statistics at Freie Universität Berlin and received funding from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation during this period. In 2018, she was awarded the Gerhard Fürst Prize by the Federal Statistical Office for her Master’s thesis. Her doctoral thesis was honoured with the Federal Statistical Office’s ‘Statistical Science for the Society’ Award 2023 and the Young Researchers’ Prize from the German Statistical Society (DStatG).

Selected Publications

• Random forests and mixed effects random forests for small area estimation of general parameters: A poverty mapping case study in Mozambique, with Krennmair, P., Schmid, T. and Tzavidis, N. 2026. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 20(1), 809-832.
• Analysing opportunity cost of care work using mixed effects random forests under aggregated auxiliary data,with Krennmair, P. and Schmid, T., Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series C, 2026, 75(1), 1-20.
• Estimating regional unemployment with mobile network data for Functional Urban Areas in Germany, with Hadam, S., Kreutzmann, A. and Schmid, T., Statistical Methods & Applications, 2023, 33, pp. 205-233.
• Estimating regional income indicators under transformations and access to limited population auxiliary information, with Schmid, T. and Tzavidis, N., Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, 2022, 185(4), pp. 1679–1706.
• Tree-Based Machine Learning in Small Area Estimation, with Krennmair, P., Schmid, T., The Survey Statistician, 2022, 86, pp. 22–31.
• Experimental UK regional consumer price inflation with model-based expenditure weights, with Dawber, J., Flower, T., Smith, P., Thomas, H., Schmid, T. and Tzavidis, N., Journal of Official Statistics, 2022, 38, pp. 213-23.
• The R package saeTrafo for estimating unit-level small area models under transformations, R package vignette, 2022.
• Schätzung regionaler Einkommensindikatoren unter Transformationen in Abwesenheit von Populations-Mikrodaten,2024, Abstract of the doctoral thesis, WISTA - Wirtschaft und Statistik.
• Modellbasierte Schätzung von regionalen Warenkörben für das Vereinigte Königreich, 2019, Master's thesis, WISTA – Wirtschaft und Statistik.