Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Contemporary science research is confronted with ever-growing masses of data. Given that scientists rely on statistics to interpret results, the availability of suitable statistical methods is essential. Unfortunately, some research questions cannot currently be answered due to the lack of appropriate statistical techniques. The proposed research will develop novel approaches to the assembly of data into groups; such approaches are known as clustering or classification. These techniques, once developed, will be released for use by researchers in every discipline through packages for the R software. The impact of this work will be felt in disciplines such as bioinformatics, where it will help identify genes that behave in a similar fashion either in general or over the time course of some experiment. There will also be real impact in other areas such as food science and sociology.