Department of Statistical Science

Professor Patrick Wolfe has been awarded a senior research fellowship in the mathematical sciences from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, entitled "Statistical Theory and Methods to Transform our Understanding of Network Data".  It will provide support for his work in statistical modelling and inference for graphs and networks over the next 5 years.  Postdoctoral positions will be advertised shortly.

Dr Christian Hennig has been invited by the president of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), Iven van Mechelen, to give a presentation on "Measurement of quality in cluster analysis" in the president's invited session at the IFCS 2013 conference in Tilburg, the Netherlands, 15-17 July. Dr Hennig will give further invited presentations on the same topic at the Summer Working Group on Mixture Models, Bologna, 22-26 July and the ISI conference in Hong Kong, 26-30 August. Dr Hennig has also been invited to speak at the ERCIM conference 2013 in London, 14-16 December (title to be announced).

Dr Christian Hennig has been awarded an EPSRC standard research grant for work on "A multicriterion approach to cluster validation".  In this research, Dr Hennig will look at the notoriously difficult problem of estimating the number of clusters from a fresh angle, connecting criteria properly to different research aims. The project includes collaborations with the robust clustering group of the University of Valladolid led by Professor Carlos Matran, the expert for biological species delimitation Dr Bernhard Hausdorf (University of Hamburg), the International Federation of Classification Societies cluster benchmarking initiative led by IFCS president Professor Iven van Mechelen (KU Leuven) and Dr Hennig's former PhD student Dr Pietro Coretto (University of Salerno).

Dr Gareth Peters has presented a recent paper on statistical modelling of commodities at the weekly Finance and Stochastics Seminar of the Mathematical Finance Group at Imperial College London. In addition, he has given a seminars on this topic to the Mathematics Departments at Nottingham University and the University of Kent.

Dr Gareth Peters and Professor Tomoko Matsui from the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in Tokyo Japan have been awarded a Royal Society International Exchange Grant between 2013 and 2015 to cover several international collaborative visits. This will further strengthen the already strong links between the Department of Statistical Science at UCL and the ISM in Japan. The research to be explored involves "Semi-parametric Inference for Data Fusion from Heterogeneous Sensor Networks".

A UCL research team led by Professor Gill Livingston (UCL Mental Health Sciences) and including Dr Gianluca Baio have been awarded a research grant of £150,000 to conduct research on facilitating early dementia diagnosis. The study will last 30 months and a part-time research assistant will be appointed within the department to work under Dr Baio's supervision.

On Wednesday May 8, Professor Valerie Isham will deliver a lecture entitled “Rainfall, Hydrology and Climate” in the series of Warwick Public Lectures in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Warwick.

Dr Ioannis Kosmidis' work on models for ordinal responses will be published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) and is expected to appear in late 2013. The article is titled "Improved estimation in cumulative link models" and concerns new estimation methods which produce estimators that are always finite, have smaller bias and mean squared error than the traditional maximum likelihood estimators, and also respect the properties that make cumulative link models a standard choice for the analysis of ordinal data that has influenced practice.