I am a Reader in Statistics and Data Science in the School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh. I completed my PhD with Prof Richard Samworth in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 2015 and then worked with Prof Yingying Fan as a Postdoc at the University of Southern California. I moved to Edinburgh in August 2018.

My research is currently supported by a three-year EPSRC New Investigator Award on `New challenges in robust statistical learning' [EP/V002694/1].

Research interests

• Statistical learning: classification and clustering

• High-dimensional data: data perturbation techniques, random projections

• Robust methods: Incomplete data, semi-supervised problems, noisy data, transfer learning

• Subgroup analysis and subgroup selection

• Applications in genomics and precision medicine

Preprints and Publications

Sell, T., Berrett, T. B. and Cannings, T. I. (2023) Nonparametric classification with missing data. Preprint. (.pdf).

Müller, M. M., Reeve, H. W. J., Cannings, T. I. and Samworth, R. J. (2023) Isotonic subgroup selection. Preprint. (.pdf). The accompanying R package ISS is available from CRAN.

Sionakidis, A., Cannings, T. I., Figueroa, J. D. and Sims, A. H. (2023) A novel gene signature to predict response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and endocrine treatment in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer patients. Preprint. (.pdf).

Merzbacher, C., Ryan, B., Goldsborough, T., Hillary, R. F., Campbell, A., Murphy, L., McIntosh, A. M., Liewald, D., Harris, S. E., McRae, A. F., Cox, S. R., Cannings, T. I., Vallejos, C. A., McCartney, D. L. and Marioni, R. E. (2023) Integration of datasets for individual prediction of DNA methylation-based biomarkers. Genome Biology, 24, 278. (.pdf).

Reeve, H. W. J., Cannings, T. I. and Samworth, R. J. (2023) Optimal subgroup selection. Ann. Statist., 51, 2342-2365. (.pdf).

Cheng, Y., Gadd, D. A., Gieger, C., Monterrubio-Gómez, K., Zhang, Y., Berta, I., Stam, M. J., Szlachetka, N., Lobzaev, E., Wrobel, N., Murphy, L., Campbell, A., Nangle, C., Walker, R. M., Fawns-Ritchie, C., Peters, A., Rathmann, W., Porteous, D. J., Evans, K. L., McIntosh, A. M., Cannings, T. I., Waldenberger, M., Ganna, A., McCartney, D. L., Vallejos, C. A. and Marioni, R. E. (2023) Development and validation of DNA Methylation scores in two European cohorts augment 10-year risk prediction of type 2 diabetes. Nature Aging, 3, 450-458. (.pdf). The accompanying R package MethylPipeR-UI is available on GitHub.

Bradley, J. R. and Cannings, T. I. (2022) Data-driven design of targeted gene panels for estimating immunotherapy biomarkers. Commun. Biol., 5, 156. (.pdf) The accompanying R package ICBioMark is available from CRAN and an associated `Behind the Paper' blog post can be read here.

Cannings, T. I. and Fan, Y. (2022) The correlation-assisted missing data estimator. J. Mach. Learn. Res., 23(41), 1-49. (.pdf)

Reeve, H. W. J., Cannings, T. I. and Samworth, R. J. (2021) Adaptive transfer learning. Ann. Statist., 49, 3618-3649. (.pdf)

Cannings, T. I. (2020) Random projections: Data perturbation for classification problems. WIREs Computational Statistics, 13, DOI: 10.1002/wics.1449.

Cannings, T. I., Fan, Y. and Samworth, R. J. (2020) Classification with imperfect training labels. Biometrika, 107, 311-330. (.pdf)

Cannings, T. I., Berrett, T. B. and Samworth, R. J. (2020) Local nearest neighbour classification with applications to semi-supervised learning. Ann. Statist., 48, 1789-1814. (.pdf)

Dubourg-Felonneau, G., Cannings, T. I., Cotter, F., Thompson, H., Patel, N., Cassidy, J. W. and Clifford, H. W. (2018) A framework for implementing machine learning on Omics data. NeurIPS ML4H workshop. (.pdf)

Cannings, T. I. and Samworth, R. J. (2017) Random projection ensemble classification. J. Roy. Statist. Soc., Ser. B (with discussion), 79 , 959-1035. (.pdf) The accompanying R package RPEnsemble is available from CRAN.

Cannings, T. I. (2015) New Approaches to Modern Statistical Classification Problems. PhD thesis (.pdf).

Cannings, T. I. (2013) Nearest neighbour classification in the tails of a distribution. (.pdf)

Group Members (past and present)

• Jacob Bradley, PhD student Sept 2019-Sept 2023, cosupervised with Kevin Myant. (Research Engineer, Canon Medical)

• Louis Chislett, PhD student Sept 2022-, cosupervised with Louis Aslett, James Liley and Catalina Vallejos

• Ria Dunn, MSc by Research student Sept 2023-Feb 2024, cosupervised with Sjoerd Beentjes

• Vasilios Raptis, PhD student Sept 2022-, cosupervised with Alasdair Maclullich and Albert Tenesa

• Torben Sell, Post-doc May 2021-Aug 2023. (Lecturer, School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh)

• Aristeidis Sionakidis, PhD student Sept 2020-Feb 2024, cosupervised with Jonine Figueroa. (Research Associate - Machine Learning, Department of Oncology, University of Cambridge)

• Wenxing Zhou, PhD student Sept 2022-

Some other interesting things

• The Centre for Statistics

• Maxwell Institute for Mathematical Sciences

• BIOS.health