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Statistics

Statistics and probability are the complementary disciplines of the science of uncertainty. That is, they deal both with systems that are intrinsically uncertain, such as the choice of a gene passed at random from parent to child, and with systems we believe not to be random but which are too complicated to model exactly, such as the climate.

There is uncertainty in almost every aspect of everyday life and, despite its reputation for exactness, in the scientific world too. Probability and statistics give us tools to handle this uncertainty in a principled manner.

The Statistics group in Bristol carries out research on many aspects of this science: modelling of random phenomena, methods for the analysis of data, and computational techniques for performing this modelling and analysis. The applications of this research are many and varied, ranging from the analysis of solar flares to robot navigation, from the behaviour of socially organised animals to traffic queues and from genetic research to signal processing.

Local news

17 September 2009
Tim Swartz from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) is visiting the Statistics group until December 2009.
28 August 2009
Congratulations to Judy Tang who has passed her PhD viva.
3 June 2009
NERC have awarded GBP 130k for a project lead by Dr Jonathan Rougier (PI, Maths) and Professor Stephen Sparks FRS (CoI, Earth Sciences), on behalf of the University's Environmental Risk Research Centre (BRISK). The study, to run over the summer and autumn, concerns our understanding of risk and uncertainty for natural hazards. The project team includes ten Bristol scientists, an Expert Panel of a further twenty scientists from the UK and abroad, and the Willis Research Network. More details are available on the project webpage
13 May 2009
Rich Everitt was selected as one of the two UK participants at the 16th European Young Statisticans Meeting in Bucharest in August. The European Young Statisticians Meetings are conferences organized every two years under the auspices of the European Regional Committee of the Bernoulli Society. The aim is to provide a scientific forum for the next generation of European researchers in probability theory and statistics. The meeting will gather about 40 participants coming from about 20 European countries. Participants are less than 30 years old or have 2 to 8 years of research experience.
8 May 2009
Hanna Jankowski (York University, Canada) will give a short course on shape-constrained estimation. The course is intended for graduate students and interested researchers and will look at shape-constrained estimation in a variety of settings. More information can be found here.
25 March 2009
The Department of Mathematics is seeking to appoint a Professor of Statistics. The overriding criteria for appointment to the chair will be the candidate's ability to provide academic leadership in both research and teaching. Applications should be received by 9.00am on Thursday 30th April 2009. More
19 January 2009
Professor Julian Besag FRS is visiting the Statistics group from 19 January. He is distinguished for his pioneering work on the statistical theory and analysis of spatial processes, especially conditional lattice systems. His work has been seminal in recent statistical developments ranging from image analysis to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.
5 January 2009
Tania Archer who was an undergraduate student in the Department of Mathematics won the 1st prize in the 2008 Project Prize Competition of the Association of Statistics Lecturers in Universities. David Leslie supervised her project on multi-armed bandit problems with regressors.
17 December 2008
Congratulations to Sean Collins, David Leslie and Azita Ghassemi who were recipients of several Teaching and Learning prizes.
20 November 2008
Congratulations to Hassan Khalil who has passed his PhD viva.
17 November 2008
Applications are invited for a 3 year fully funded PhD studentship on the algorithmic aspects and the theoretical underpinnings of distributed estimation, and detection in wireless networks and systems. More
3 November 2008
Congratulations to David Leslie who was elected to Council of the Royal Statistical Society.
16 October 2008
Yet more new members of the group! Welcome to postdocs Dan Lawson and Richard Everitt.
1 October 2008
Welcome to several new members of the group. James Cruise, Jack O'Brien and Nick Whiteley are postdoctoral researchers, while Dror Fidler, Joseph Forrester, Emma Kershaw and Ben May start their graduate studies.
23 September 2008
Congratulations to Dan Bailey and Richard Everitt, both of whom have passed their PhD vivas.

Extracting signals from noisy gene expression data requires novel statistical techniques.

Our research is internationally recognised, receives the top rating from the national funding council, and is funded by a wide range of public and commercial organisations. It includes both fundamental work on the core of our disciplines, and inter-disciplinary collaboration with researchers in other subjects, both in Bristol and beyond. All of our work is mathematically rigourous, and all is ultimately stimulated by its potential in understanding the world around us.