bjw.jpg
 
 

Dr Bruce Worton

Reader in Statistics
 
Office: JCMB 4617
Phone: +44 (0)131 650 4884
Email: Bruce.Worton@ed.ac.uk


Bio:

I am a Reader in Statistics at the University of Edinburgh. Previously I was a lecturer at the University of Essex from 1991-1995; and a Postdoctoral Research Associate from 1989-1991 at the University of Oxford. I have a PhD in Statistics from the University of Kent.

I have been a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society for over 30 years, as well as being a member of the International Biometric Society. From 2000 for several years I was an Examiner for the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' professional examinations, with particular responsibility for Subject 101 Statistical Modelling and then Core Technical Subject CT3 Probability and Mathematical Statistics, together with two academic colleagues at Heriot-Watt University. I maintain close links with past statistics graduates from Edinburgh, who have gone on to diverse stats-based careers, and like to keep up with current issues in statistical practice.

I was the Director of the Statistics MSc programmes for the last 10 years until December 2020:

- Statistics with Data Science MSc
- Statistics and Operational Research MSc

I am currently the Deputy Director of Teaching in the School of Mathematics.

Research interests:

- Applied statistics
- Monte Carlo methods
- Bootstrap likelihood

If you are interested in studying for a PhD in one of the above areas, or a related area, get in touch.

Some past PhD/MSc students:

- Dr Daniel Tait

- Dr Mizanur Khondoker

- Professor George Streftaris

- Dr Chris McLellan

- Dr Anastasia Ignatieva

- Dr Duncan MacGregor

- Paul Gona

- Professor Riccardo Marioni

Preprints:

- Daniel J. Tait, Bruce J. Worton. (2019). Multiplicative Latent Force Models. Available as arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.00423.

Selected publications:

- Anastasia Ignatieva, Andrew F. Bell, Bruce J. Worton. (2018). Point process models for quasi-periodic volcanic earthquakes. Statistics in Volcanology 4, 1-27. Paper

- Anastasia Ignatieva, Andrew F. Bell, Bruce J. Worton. (2018). Comparison of MCMC approaches with an application to volcano earthquake processes. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, University of Bristol.

- Duncan McGregor, Andrew Bell, Bruce J. Worton (2017). Modelling and categorisation of seismic waves. Proceedings of the 32nd International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Johann Bernoulli Institute, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands.

- Daniel Tait, Nadine Geiger, Bruce J. Worton, Andrew Bell and Ian G. Main (2016). Nonlinear modelling of experimental rock failure data. In Dupuy, J.-F. and J. Josse (eds.), Proceedings of the 31st International workshop on Statistical Modelling Vol. II, Rennes, France, 151-154.

- McLellan, C.R., Worton, B.J., Deasy, W. and Birch, A.N.E. (2015). Modelling larval movement data from individual bioassays. Biometrical Journal 57, 485-501. Preprint

- Schafer, L.M. and Worton, B.J. (2015). Modelling wind direction with an application. Proceedings of the 30th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Linz, Austria. Eds.: Herwig Friedl and HelgaWagner. pp. 243-246.

- Worton, B.J. and McLellan, C.R. (2014). Comparison of robust and nonparametric measures of fidelity. Proceedings of the 29th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Georg-August-Universitat, Goettingen, Germany. Eds.: Thomas Kneib, Fabian Sobotka, Jan Fahrenholz and Henriette Irmer. pp. 177-180.

- Worton, B.J. and McLellan, C.R. (2013). Hidden Markov modelling of diffusion with an application in entomology. Proceedings of the 28th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling , Universit di Palermo, Italy. Eds.: Muggeo, V.M.R., Capursi, V., Boscaino, G. and Lovison G., pp. 823-826.

- Worton, B.J. (2012). Efficient construction of a smooth nonparametric family of empirical distributions and calculation of bootstrap likelihood. Computational Statistics 27, 269-283. Paper

- McLellan, C.R., Worton, B.J., Deasy, W., and Birch, A.N.E. (2012). Modelling tracks of cabbage root fly larvae in a novel study of crop protection. Proceedings of the 27th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Prague, Eds.: A. Komarek and S. Nagy, pp. 221-227.

- Worton, B.J. and McLellan, C.R. (2011). Robust mixture modelling of telemetry data in wildlife studies of home range. Proceedings of the 26th International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Valencia, Eds.: Conesa, D., Forte, A., Lopez-Quilez, A. and Munoz, F., pp. 656-659. ISBN 978-84-694-5129-8.

- Worton, B.J. (2010). Modelling by using a smooth family of empirical distributions and an application to failure time data. Proceedings of the 25nd International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Glasgow, UK, Ed.: Bowman, A. W., pp. 581-585.

- Leather, H., O'Boyle, M. and Worton, B. (2009). Raced profiles: efficient selection of competing compiler optimizations. Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers, and tools for embedded systems. Pages 50-59. ISBN:978-1-60558-356-3

- Khondoker, M.R., Glasbey, C.A. and Worton, B. J. (2009). Multiscan: Combining multiple laser scans of microarrays. Bioconductor package http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.3/bioc/html/multiscan.html.

- Streftaris, G. and Worton, B.J. (2008). Efficient and accurate approximate Bayesian inference with an application to insurance data. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 52, 2604-2622.

- Khondoker, M.R., Glasbey, C.A. and Worton, B.J. (2007). A comparison of parametric and nonparametric methods for normalising cDNA microarray data. Biometrical Journal 49, 815-823.

- Streftaris, G. and Worton, B.J. (2007). Hierarchical and empirical Bayes estimators in the analysis of insurance claims. Proceedings of the 22nd International Workshop on Statistical Modelling, Barcelona, Spain, Eds.: del Castillo, J., Espinal, A. and Puig, P., pp. 556-559. ISBN 978-84-690-5943-2.

- Khondoker, M.R., Glasbey, C.A. and Worton, B.J. (2006). Statistical estimation of gene expression using multiple laser scans of microarrays. Bioinformatics 22 no. 2, 215-219.

Miscellaneous information:

- My Erdös number is 3.

- Using the AMS collaboration distance calculator apparently I'm only four hops from Einstein! :)