Honours projects in Statistics

Below you will find some descriptions of Honours projects or areas of staff interest. If you find a staff member listed below, but no associated information, you should consider talking to them to find out more about the opportunities for carrying out an Honours project with them.

• Dr Gary Glonek

  Please feel free to contact me to discuss possible honours projects.

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• Dr Andrew Metcalfe

  You may have your own ideas for the subject of your honours thesis, and I would be happy to discuss these. For example, two recent projects were an inter-country analysis of tourist arrivals, and a comparison of exchange rates, and derived indices, for different countries. Alternatively, I can offer:

  • Drought indices and relationship to global climatic indices

    The Environment Agency (EA), in the UK, uses a variation of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) used in the USA. The EA index includes a relationship between the standard deviations for all durations and starting months that allows the index to be used continuosly for as long as the drought lasts. The project is to compare the practical performance of these two indices, and to investigate other drought indices, and any relationship with global climatic indices such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Data for UK, Australia, and maybe USA, will be available. [in collaboration with a hydrological consultant in the USA and Adelaide civil engineers]

  • Kriging and co-Kriging

    Kriging is spatial interpolation, and co-Kriging allows for additional predictor variables. The project is to assess load bearing capabilities of consolidated clay in the Adelaide area. Data are available. [in collaboration with Mark Jaksa in Civil Engineering]

  • Multivariate extreme values

    The project is to fit various extreme value distribution models for multivariate data to flood data from Namibia. [in collaboration with Peter Adamson, Visiting Research Fellow]

  • Dynamic response of a small ship

    The dynamic response of a small ship is expected to vary with its heading relative to the waves. We have data from such a ship sailing an octagonal course, and there is also scope for a theoretical discussion based on a literature review [data from Professor GE Hearn, University of Southampton].

  • Comparison of ANN and regression models

    Artificial neural networks (ANN) are often considered to be over-parameterised. But, they seem to give good results when they are fitted to large data sets and used for interpolation. The aim of the project is to investigate the pros and cons of using ANN, rather than standard regression models, in a hydrological context. Data are available for the Mekong and the objective is to predict the low level flow from the annual flood. Predicton of the low flow is important because farmers use it to decide whether or not to plant a third rice crop [data from Peter Adamson, Visiting Research Fellow].

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• Dr Paul Slade

  Please feel free to contact me to discuss possible honours projects.

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• Associate Professor Patty Solomon

  I am happy to supervise Honours Projects in any areas of biostatistics, statistical bioinformatics, and statistical modelling and applications. My current research areas include gene expression studies, design and analysis of microarray experiments, proteomics, survival analysis, statistical epidemiology, clinical trials and components of variance. If you are interested in doing Statistics Honours in 2006/7, please contact me at any time either by email at patty.solomon@adelaide.edu.au, or by phone on 8303 3033.

  I am currently supervising an Honours Project on the hidden mortality resulting from influenza epidemics in Australia, which involves studying the epidemiology of influenza subtypes and novel Poisson regression models. I recently supervised two Statistics Honours Projects in bioinformatics:

  • Equivalence in gene expression studies. This Project involved developing methods for the design and analysis of equivalence microarray studies, which turns standard hypothesis testing on its head, and was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Science and the IMVS/Hanson Institute. This Project has led to PhD research on this topic in 2006.
  • cDNA and long oligonucleotide microarray experiments in apoptosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death and this study compared statistical methods for the analysis of factorial experiments undertaken using two different microarray platforms, and was conducted in collaboration with researchers from the IMVS/Hanson Institute.
  

  A microarray image from a human clone set.

  

  The robotic arrayer at the Adelaide Microarray Facility.

  Other recent Projects I have supervised include:

  • Monitoring Surgical Outcomes
  • The Statistical Analysis of cDNA Microarray Data
  • Statistical Methods for the Prediction of AIDS in the Western Pacific Region
  • Models for AIDS Marker Data

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