The Department of Statistics at Oxford is a world leader in research including computational statistics and statistical methodology, applied probability, bioinformatics and mathematical genetics. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), Oxford's Mathematical Sciences submission was ranked overall best in the UK.
This is an exciting time for the Department. We have now moved into our new home on St Giles and we are currently settling in.
The new building provides improved lecture and teaching space, a variety of interaction areas, and brings together researchers in Probability and Statistics. It has created a highly visible centre for the Department in Oxford.
Since 2010, the Department has been awarded over forty research grants with a total value of £9M, not counting several very large EPSRC and MRC funded awards for Centres for doctoral training.The main sponsors are the European Commission, EPSRC, the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.
We offer an undergraduate degree (BA or MMath) in Mathematics and Statistics, jointly with the Mathematical Institute.
At postgraduate level there is an MSc course in Applied Statistics, as well as a lively and stimulating environment for postgraduate research (DPhil or MSc by Research). Our graduates are employed in a wide range of occupational sectors throughout the world, including the university sector.
The Department co-hosts the EPSRC and MRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Next-Generational Statistical Science- the Oxford-Warwick Statistics Programme OxWaSP.
Last refreshed: ⓘ
Follow this podcast in the Metacast mobile app to refresh it and see new episodes.
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more
Part of the Probability for Machine Learning seminar series. Presented by Prof Lester Mackey (Microsoft Research New England and Stanford University). Abstract: Stein’s method is a powerful tool from probability theory for bounding the distance between probability distributions. In this talk, I’ll describe how this tool designed to prove central limit theorems can be adapted to assess and improve the quality of practical inference procedures. I’ll highlight applications to Markov chain Monte Car...
Dr. Ekaterina Volkova-Volkmar, Senior Data Scientist, pRED Informatics - Data Science, Roche Pharma Research and Early Development, Roche, Basel, Switzerland, gives a talk on deep learning and graph neural networks in biomedicine.
Jonny Brooks-Bartlett, Senior machine learning engineer at Spotify, gives a talk on his experiences as a data scientist and as machine learning engineer in top rated companies around the world. It's been almost 4 years since I left academia to work as a data scientist in industry. In that time I've worked in several teams at a couple of companies. I've also spoken to many other data scientists and consulted literature to get a better picture of the current landscape. In this presentation I take ...
Jason Forrest, Director of Interactive Data Visualization, COVID Response Centre, McKinsey and Co, New York, gives the Department of Statistics Black History Month lecture, with a talk on the work of African-American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, an all African-American team lead by scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois sought to challenge and recontextualize the perception of African-Americans at the dawn of the 20th-century. In less than 5 months, his team co...
Fiona Lethbridge, Science Media Centre, gives a talk on the Science Media Centre and it's work. Fiona is a senior press officer at the Science Media Centre and has worked there since July 2012. She has a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Edinburgh. The Science Media Centre is an independent press office which opened in 2002 and believes that scientists can have a huge impact on the way the media cover scientific issues, by engaging quickly and effectively with the stories that a...
Dr Fergus Cooper, Research Software Engineer, Oxford RSE Group, gives a talk for the department of Statistics on 5th June 2020. Following on from Graham Lee's talk on automated testing, we will use GitHub actions to automate the testing of a small Python project. We will: recap why this might be a good idea; walk through setting up a workflow on GitHub; test our code against multiple Python versions on multiple operating systems; and integrate other services such as code coverage and automated d...
Graham Lee, Research Software Engineer, Oxford RSE Group, gives talk for the department of Statistics on 22nd May 2020. Abstract: If we want reliable, reproducible simulations and data analysis software, we need to know that we have implemented our code correctly. Further, we need to be confident that changes we make to the code do not introduce unintended flaws. Automated testing is a technique widely used in industry to capture information about the expected behaviour of software and ensure th...
Nick Jewell, University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, gives a talk for the departmental of Statistics on 28th May 2020. Abstract: The successful introduction of the intracellular bacterium Wolbachia into Aedes aegypti mosquitoes enables a practical approach for dengue prevention through release of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes. Wolbachia reduces dengue virus replication in the mosquito and, once established in the mosquito population, it is possible that this will provide a lo...
Radford M. Neal (University of Toronto), gives a talk for the department of Statistics. Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is an attractive MCMC method for continuous distributions because it makes use of the gradient of the log probability density to propose points far from the current point, avoiding slow exploration by a random walk (RW). The Langevin method - equivalent to HMC with one leapfrog step - also uses gradient information, but is slow due to RW behaviour. In this talk, I discuss how the...
Providing a whirlwind tour of the quantitative analyses currently underway to understand the transmission and control of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCOV). Recorded on 31st January 2020. www.imperial.ac.uk -> mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis -> News--wuhan-coronavirus LINK - https://tinyurl.com/mrc-global-infectious-disease Biology Preprint paper: 2019-20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak: Intense surveillance is vital for preventing sustained transmission in new locations LINK - https://ww...
The Ninth annual Florence Nightingale Lecture, given by Professor Dame Janet Thornton, European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge. Held on Thursday 21st April 2016. Florence Nightingale was a celebrated nurse who served the British Army during the Crimean War. Her ground-breaking use of data visualisation turned a spotlight on the terrible hospital sanitation, and brought the issue to the attention of the British establishment. She went on to epidemiological work in India, statistically provin...
