Probability and Statistics
The field of Probability and Statistics encompasses a broad array
of topics in pure and applied mathematics, and has applications in almost every field
of scientific research. The theoretical foundations of Probability Theory
were developed in the early twentieth century by Kolmogorov and other workers,
and this led to an explosion of applications in every scientific field. By its nature
the field is driven by real-world applications, and this is reflected in the work
of the members of the Probability and Statistics group, whose
research ranges from applied
Statistics to inter-disciplinary research to pure mathematics.
One major area of applications is Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Adam Ding
has worked on several problems in biostatistics, including the statistical
analysis of data from HIV clinical trials, analysis of multiple correlated
survival times and current status data in epidemiology, and the analysis of genetic micro-array data.
Michael Maliuotov
has developed probabilistic models of protein dynamics, and used them to
analyse molecular diffusion in the human brain.
Another major direction of research concerns estimation problems, that is
how to extract useful information from noisy data.
Michael Maliuotov
has worked on many aspects of this question, and some of
his current research topics are:
discrimination of close Markov chains; the EM algorithm;
sequential search for significant variables. This work has applications in
multi-target estimation in the presence of noise and clutter, and molecular dynamics
of proteins.
Adam Ding
has analysed how neural networks can be used to predict and control noisy systems,
and has worked on the High-dimensional Empirical Linear Prediction (HELP) system
for quality control in industrial engineering.
Another area of current interest in the group is
quantum computing and quantum information theory. In this area
Sam Gutmann
works on quantum algorithms and new paradigms for quantum computing, and
Chris King
works on quantum channel capacity problems and
the role of entanglement in noisy quantum systems.
Last modified October 2009
|
