Department of Statistical Science

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Dr James Nelson

Position	Lecturer
Phone (external)	+44 (0)20 7679 1875
Phone (internal)	41875
Email(*)	j.nelson
Personal webpage	http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakjdb/
Themes	Stochastic Modelling and Time Series

* @ucl.ac.uk

Biographical Details

James Nelson joined the Department of Statistical Science as a lecturer in 2010. After a PhD in applied harmonic analysis from the Mathematics Department at Anglia Polytechnic University (1998-2001), he held post-doc positions in: the Applied Mathematics and Computing Group at the University of Cranfield (2001-2004); the Information: Signals, Images, and Systems Research Group at the University of Southampton (2004-2006); and the Signal Processing and Communications Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (2006-2010).

Research Interests

Wavelet analysis, random fields, and machine learning for statistical signal and image processing. In particular: wavelet/Riesz basis construction and sparsity with applications to detection and classification; Markov random fields; weak self-similar random fields; multiresolution analysis for machine learning, support vector machine kernel construction and hyper-parameter estimation for pattern recognition; generalised sampling theory; Hurst index estimation for texture and volatility models.

Applications: defence, life sciences, crime & security, and computational finance.

Post-docs

• Vladimir Krylov

  • statistical image analysis for mammography
  • anomaly detection and semi-supervised learning methods for underwater acoustics
• Diego Tomassi (sparse regularisation & random fields)
  
  

Research Students

• James Le Roux (sparsity and multiresolution analysis for volatility analysis and high frequency financial computing; with Prof. Sofia Olhede)
• Alex Gibberd (statistical signal processing and machine learning for network traffic anomaly detection)
• Nabanita Basu (computer vision and machine learning for blood spatter analysis; 1st supervisor Dr. Ruth Morgan, Department of Security and Crime Science)
• Christian Niedworok (automated cell detection algorithms in 2-photon microscopy of whole brain images; 1st supervisor Prof. Troy Margrie, MRC National Institute for Medical Research)
• To be announced (temporal statistical models of banknote ageing; 1st supervisor Prof. Mark Girolami)

Selected publications

• Nelson, J. D. B. and Kingsbury, N. G. (2012) Fractal dimension, wavelet shrinkage, and anomaly detection for mine hunting. IET Signal Processing Journal.
• Nelson, J. D. B. and Kingsbury, N. G. (2011) Enhanced shift and scale tolerance for rotation invariant polar matching with dual-tree wavelets. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(3): 814-821.
• Nelson, J. D. B. and Kingsbury, N. G. (2010) Fractal dimension based sand ripple suppression for mine hunting with sidescan sonar. Institute of Acoustics International Conference on Synthetic Aperture Sonar and Synthetic Aperture Radar.
• Nelson, J. D. B., Damper, R. I., Gunn, S. R. and Guo, B. (2009) A signal theory approach to support vector classification: the Sinc kernel. Neural Networks, 22 (1): 49-57.
• Guo, B., Gunn, S. R., Damper, R. I. and Nelson, J. D. B. (2008) "A fast separability-based feature selection method for highdimensional remotely-sensed image classification". Pattern Recognition 41 (8): 1670-1679

• Nelson, J. D. B. (2005) A wavelet filter enhancement scheme with a fast integral B-wavelet transform and pyramidal multi-B wavelet algorithm, Journal of Applied & Computational Harmonic Analysis, 18(3): 234-251.
  
  

  More publications, with preprints, can be found here
  
  See also my Google Scholar and Google Sites pages and the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning site.