When I was a pupil at Sutton High School, Regent Street, Plymouth (1959-66), I would catch the bus across Mutley Plain and along the Tavistock Road, and disembark by the public library, with the gaunt, grey buildings of Plymouth Technical College opposite. But by 1992, the technical college had been replaced by the modern buildings of the University, that overlook the vast historical expanse of Plymouth Sound (from whence Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, and their contemporaries once sailed to found the British Empire, albeit on the back of their cruel and barbaric slave trading)
One of the main university buildings is named after Lady Nancy Astor MP whose statue was recently erected on Plymouth Hoe not far from Sir Francis Drake's.
I visited my hometown frequently after I returned from the U.S. in 1995. During December 1998, I presented a seminar to the statisticians in the university based upon my paper with John Hsu (Biometrika, 1997). David Wright (now retired) and Julian Stander were most hospitable, and John Eales (pictured immediately below) encouraged me to watch Plymouth Argyle (from the stands rather than the terraces of my youth). The Pilgrims beat Carlisle United by a score of two to nil, and the second goal was, as I remember, scored from a mighty distance.
David Wright subsequently visited Edinburgh as external examiner for my student Orestis Papasouliotis's Ph.D. thesis and focussed on the applications of Statistics in Geophysics which we'd developed with Ian Main. Julian Stander presented a seminar in our King's Buildings, and joined us for dinner in Ciao Roma Then I visited Plymouth to give a Ph.D. viva for one of Dave's students. Julian was the internal examiner,
In 2002, I attended the Royal Statistical Society Annual Conference on the main Plymouth campus. Many statisticians attended including Terry Speed and my friend Steve Fienberg. The conference dinner across Dartmoor in Buckland Abbey Barn will be long remembered, and I was able to continue my acquaintances with Julian and Dave.
During the nineteen years since I last visited, the statisticians at Plymouth have created an epicentre that influences the whole of Devon, Cornwall, and beyond, for example in Big Data analysis, medical statistics, sports statistics, and statistical education. The statisticians at the University of Exeter are of course pre-eminent in public health and environmental and climate change statistics.
Victoria Allgar (Ph.D. Newcastle) has recently been appointed from Hull University as the Professor of Medical Statistics in the Peninsula Medical School (in Plymouth Science Park In Derriford) that is run in partnership with the University of Exeter. She is Director of the Peninsula Clinical Trial Unit that is involved in clinical and applied health and care research. She is ably assisted by Senior Research Fellows Dr. Amy Baker, who specialises in Down Syndrome screening and Dr. Joanne Hosking, who focuses on Statistics and Numeracy, and by their talented, locally qualified research assistant Jade Chynoweth
Research in Statistics and Data Science is grouped around five areas: modelling and inference, statistical learning, applications to medicine and health, applications to business and finance, and statistical education.
Particular areas of expertise include multivariate dependency and time series modelling, data integration, social media information extraction, evidence synthesis and meta-analysis, and business internationalisation.
Also in Mathematical Sciences, some of Dr. Malgorzata Wojtys's research stems from her doctoral research at the University of Warsaw on the estimation of probability density functionals by model selection. This is an extremely valuable area in terms of application, that also relates to my own research interests, for example her joint paper:
Mielniczuk J., Wojtyś M. (2014) P-value model selection criteria for exponential families of increasing dimension. Metrika 77, 257 – 284.
More recently, Dr. Wojtys has published valuable contributions on copula models.
Statistician John Eales (Ph.D. Bath, 1991) is Deputy Head of the School of Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics. He focusses on the way Statistics is taught to students and the community and the way Statistics is used to enhance Science and social endeavour.
In their quite inspiring REF Impact Case Study (please watch fantastic video) John Eales and Associate Professor Julian Stander use highly original Bayesian statistical techniques e.g to analyse vision data for school children, and sports data e.g. concerning Plymouth Argyle. There are a number of powerful social messages e.g. relating to discrimination against black footballers, The great Argyle player Jack Leslie was denied a cap for England because he was black. My father watched him play in the 1920s and 30s, He thought that the way Leslie combined with Sammy Black was phenomenal to watch.
The statisticians in Mathematical Sciences have increased pupil and public participation with the mathematical sciences through school taster days and Plymouth Argyle Football Club. John Eales has been closely associated with the club for the last few years.
Emeritus Professor Neville Davies also has interests in statistical education.
During our pre-Christmas correspondence John and I have referred to my memories about Argyle from the 1960s. Charlton Athletic defeated Argyle 6 to 4 at home on Boxing Day 1960, only to lose 6 to 4 the very next day at Home Park, with Wilf Carter scoring 5 of Plymouth's goals, John advises me that Argyle has won 6 to 4 on 5 separate occasions, a fascinating statistic. This is Football League record, which Argyle share with Wolves (Steve Rhodes)
See also
Has English Football become less exciting?
by Statso (John Eales), Stander, and Cortina Borja
John and I are currently analysing a two-way contingency table recording numbers of goals scored for and against Plymouth Argyle, by fitting a quasi-independence model, and looking for deviations from the conditional independence assumption
Julian Stander and his co-authors have also contributed important analyses of the coronovirus data, which were published in the Royal Statistical Society journal Significance:
Returning to Schools and Universities at times of Coronavirus
by Sebastiani and Stander
Some comparisons between the Italy and the UK for Covid 19
by Sebastiani, Stander, and Cortina Borja
The Statistics group in Mathematical Sciences runs a splendid final year module called Data Modelling that even covers Bayesian statistical inference. Bayesian inference using MCMC is simulated using Stan. Bayesian multi-level modelling is covered on the Mathematical Education Project module.
This is of course only true if your statistical model is assumed to be perfectly correctly specified, and, as George E.P. Box repeatedly said "All models are wrong, though some are useful."
Also in the Mathematical Sciences group, Dr Alessandro Cardinali has made important contributions to applications of wavelets in time series analysis and to stochastic volatility in time series (with applications in Economics)
Furthermore, Associate Professor Luciana Dalla Valle has worked on a variety of statistical techniques and applications, including generalised logistic regression and a Bayesian analysis of immigration in Europe.
A very vibrant Statistics group indeed!
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