Advanced Mixture Models for the Analysis of Modern-Day Data. Extracting key information from huge data sets is critical to the scientific successes of the future. This project will develop novel mixture models that can be used directly to analyse complex and high-dimensional data sets that may consist of thousands of variables observed on only a limited number of entities. In order to handle the challenging problems arising in the latter situation. This project develops mixtures of factor models ....Advanced Mixture Models for the Analysis of Modern-Day Data. Extracting key information from huge data sets is critical to the scientific successes of the future. This project will develop novel mixture models that can be used directly to analyse complex and high-dimensional data sets that may consist of thousands of variables observed on only a limited number of entities. In order to handle the challenging problems arising in the latter situation. This project develops mixtures of factor models with options for skew distributions that can be used to effectively analyse such data. Key applications include the domains of bioinformatics, biostatistics, business, data mining, economics, finance, image analysis, marketing, and personalised medicine, among many others.Read moreRead less
Joint clustering and matching of multivariate samples across objects. The project will provide a novel and very effective approach to the clustering of multivariate samples on objects, say patients, that automatically matches the sample clusters across the objects. A key application is the matching of biologically relevant cell subtypes across patients for use in the study and the clinical diagnosis and prognosis of cancer.
Expanding the role of mixture models in statistical analyses of big data. This project aims to develop theoretical procedures to scale inference and learning algorithms to analyse big data sets. It will develop analytic tools and algorithms to analyse big data sets which classical methods of inference cannot analyse directly due to the data’s complexity or size. This will accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation, leading, for example, to new fields of inquiry; to an increas ....Expanding the role of mixture models in statistical analyses of big data. This project aims to develop theoretical procedures to scale inference and learning algorithms to analyse big data sets. It will develop analytic tools and algorithms to analyse big data sets which classical methods of inference cannot analyse directly due to the data’s complexity or size. This will accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation, leading, for example, to new fields of inquiry; to an increase in understanding from studies on human and social processes and interactions; and to the promotion of economic growth and improved health and quality of life. Such applications should lead to breakthrough discoveries and innovation in science, engineering, medicine, commerce, education and national security.Read moreRead less
A new approach to fast matrix factorization for the statistical analysis of high-dimensional data. Some form of dimension reduction is essential in order to extract meaningful information from huge data sets. For this purpose we provide a novel and very fast approach to the factorization of the data matrix. It has wide applicability for improving the quality and validity of research in science and medicine and in most industries in Australia.
Large-Scale Statistical Inference: Multiple Testing. Multiple testing procedures are among the most important statistical tools for the analysis of modern data. This project aims to develop new methods for providing more powerful simultaneous tests while controlling the proportion of false positive conclusions. They are proposed to be derived by the novel pooling of information in individual attribute based contrasts to produce a Weighted Individual attribute-Specific Contrast (WISC) based stati ....Large-Scale Statistical Inference: Multiple Testing. Multiple testing procedures are among the most important statistical tools for the analysis of modern data. This project aims to develop new methods for providing more powerful simultaneous tests while controlling the proportion of false positive conclusions. They are proposed to be derived by the novel pooling of information in individual attribute based contrasts to produce a Weighted Individual attribute-Specific Contrast (WISC) based statistic. They will also exploit contextual information. They are expected to be of direct application to the problem of testing for no differences between two or more classes, as in the detection of differential expression in bioinformatics. Other key applications are expected to include biomedicine, economics, finance, genetics, and neuroscience.Read moreRead less
Dynamics and Security Control of Complex Networks. The research will yield basic techniques to analyse, design and operate complex networks so that security, as well as performance, is achieved. These techniques will be further developed towards particular applications including power grids and telecommunication networks. However, the emphasis is on providing basic ideas and techniques.
Construction of near optimal oscillatory regimes in singularly perturbed control systems via solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman inequalities. Problems of optimal control of systems evolving in multiple time scales arise in a great variety of applications (from diet to environmental modelling). This project addresses the challenge of analytically and numerically constructing rapidly oscillating controls that would 'near optimally coordinate' the slow and fast dynamics.
Security and Privacy of Individual Data Used to Extract Public Information. The project aims to contribute to the development of techniques to allow the harvesting of useful information without compromising personal privacy. Intelligent analysis of personal data can reveal valuable knowledge about a population but at a risk of invading an individual's privacy. This project aims to provide at least partial solutions to some of the problems associated with the protection of private data. In partic ....Security and Privacy of Individual Data Used to Extract Public Information. The project aims to contribute to the development of techniques to allow the harvesting of useful information without compromising personal privacy. Intelligent analysis of personal data can reveal valuable knowledge about a population but at a risk of invading an individual's privacy. This project aims to provide at least partial solutions to some of the problems associated with the protection of private data. In particular, it plans to work on the problem of security of statistical databases and privacy of streaming data. This would be underpinned by a study of anonymisation and homomorphic encryption. The expected outcomes are new theoretical results, new algorithms and protocols applicable to at least some of the current significant problems in information security.Read moreRead less
Understanding online attention and user-generated content creation: An information consumption and production perspective. There is a strong practical need for methods for understanding and measuring online behaviour. In this project, economic index number theory will be used to study information consumption, leading to new ways of measuring online attention and influence. Techniques for studying scaling relationships in the physical world will be used to study information production, leading to ....Understanding online attention and user-generated content creation: An information consumption and production perspective. There is a strong practical need for methods for understanding and measuring online behaviour. In this project, economic index number theory will be used to study information consumption, leading to new ways of measuring online attention and influence. Techniques for studying scaling relationships in the physical world will be used to study information production, leading to new insights into the efficiency of production of user-generated content. The project will contribute to understanding how social media such as Twitter contribute to social unrest and affect consumer decisions, and how distributed online collaboration can produce economically-valuable information resources such as Wikipedia.Read moreRead less
Decomposition and Duality: New Approaches to Integer and Stochastic Integer Programming. Because of their rich modelling capabilities, integer programs are widely used in industry for decision making and planning. However their solution algorithms do not have the maturity of their cousins in convex optimisation, where the theory of strong duality is ubiquitous. Efficient methods for convex optimisation under uncertainty do not apply to the integer case, which is highly non-convex. Furthermore, i ....Decomposition and Duality: New Approaches to Integer and Stochastic Integer Programming. Because of their rich modelling capabilities, integer programs are widely used in industry for decision making and planning. However their solution algorithms do not have the maturity of their cousins in convex optimisation, where the theory of strong duality is ubiquitous. Efficient methods for convex optimisation under uncertainty do not apply to the integer case, which is highly non-convex. Furthermore, integer models usually assume the data is known with certainty, which is often not the case in the real world. This project will develop new theory and algorithms to enhance the analysis of integer models, including those that incorporating uncertainty, while also enabling the use of parallel computing paradigms. Read moreRead less