Professor Simon Wood from the University’s Department of Mathematical Sciences has been awarded a prestigious Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Fellowship worth £600k.
The Fellowship grant will fund a five-year project – Sparse, rank-reduced and general smooth modelling – developing statistical modelling methods for predicting patterns in large complex datasets.
These models have a wide range of applications including: predicting load on national electricity grids, understanding the risk factors for cancers, and investigating the links between air pollution and deaths from respiratory disease.
Professor Wood explains: “Across science, engineering and industry, statistical models are the main tool by which raw data are converted into usefully reliable information.
“Generalized additive models are a class of statistical models which allow us to investigate and represent the smooth relationship between different data variables in an automatic way, allowing one of the variables to be predicted using the others. For example, we might want to predict deaths from respiratory disease on the basis of time of year, temperature, ground level ozone and other pollutants. Work at Bath, on reliable estimation methods for generalized additive models, has played a substantial part in promoting their wide uptake.
“However as new technology drives up the size and complexity of datasets, the complexity of the models required to extract the data’s information also increases. This project will provide the new estimation methods required to deal with this increased complexity.”