PHD STUDENTSHIP IN STATISTICS AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY

*** Closing date end of next week ***

Applications are invited for a full-time PhD studentship in
Statistics commencing 1 October, 2011. The studentship will include
University fees and a grant to cover living expenses.

The studentship will be based at the Open University's central
campus in Milton Keynes, where there is a thriving postgraduate
student community. The Statistics Group at the Open University
provides a lively and stimulating environment for Statistics
research with active researchers working in a variety of fields of
statistics. For more information about the Statistics Group see
http://statistics.open.ac.uk/.

Two possible Statistics projects are available:

Title: Measuring Performance in Orienteering
Supervisor: Dr Karen Vines

Title: Comparing Recently Proposed Families of Distributions
Supervisor: Prof Chris Jones

Full details of each project can be found below.

Applicants should have a first or upper second class honours degree
and, preferably, a recognized postgraduate qualification containing
a substantial element of Statistics. Applications from all
nationalities are welcome.

Informal enquiries may be made to Catriona Queen (email:
[log in to unmask]).

APPLICATION PROCESS

The Open University's Research Degrees Prospectus and application
form, can be found at
http://www.open.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/. When applying for
the studentship please include:

a) a completed application form (note that where the standard
application form asks for a research proposal, simply indicate
which (one or more) of the advertised projects you are interested
in),

and

b) a covering letter explaining why you want to do a PhD and why
you are interested in one or other (or both) projects.

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS: Friday, 18 February, 2011.

********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
PROJECT DETAILS

Project: Measuring Performance in Orienteering Supervisor: Dr Karen
Vines

Orienteering is a running sport in which competitors are expected
to navigate their way to a series of locations ('controls') as
quickly as possible (see for example
www.britishorienteering.org.uk). Judging and comparing the
performance of orienteers is not straightforward for a number of
reasons, including the following.

* Times at different competitions ('events') are not directly
comparable as the courses set inevitably vary. Thus what might be
regarded as a very good time at one event could easily correspond
to a poor result at another nominally equivalent event. * A poor
performance might be the result of a slow running speed or the
occasional serious navigational error or something in-between.
These causes have different implications when it comes to training.
A slow running speed suggests that the orienteer needs to spend
more time developing their physical fitness. In contrast orienteers
who have a propensity towards making serious navigation errors
needs to concentrate on developing their orienteering technique.
* Some events aim to find the orienteer that most exceeded what was
expected of them - with this expectation typically based on their
age and gender. It is a difficult balancing act for any
handicapping system to achieve fairness over the large range of
ages that orienteering attracts.

The aim of this project is to examine existing methods for judging
and comparing the performance of orienteers from a statistical
point of view. Also, using techniques such as non-linear
regression, robust estimation and outlier identification to develop
new, justified, methodology that will be of help to orienteers. To
this end, the intention is to make use of the wealth of
orienteering results data that is publicly available, data which
are rich and complex.

Although the project will be geared to tackling performance
measurement issues specifically in orienteering, it is anticipated
that the methodology will have wider applicability, both in other
sports and more generally. For example the methodology might
provide a new way of comparing runners who take part in road races,
or in the measuring performance of race horses. Equally methodology
produced for fair handicapping could play a role in fitness and
health monitoring where there is a need to adjust performance for
age and gender. The methodology might also improve the formulation
of performance league tables such as those used to compare the
performance of schools or hospitals by improving the adjustment
procedure for known confounders such as the initial abilities of
pupils or the mix of patient types. Successful completion of this
project could therefore have benefits far beyond the narrow
confines of orienteering.


Project: Comparing Recently Proposed Families of Distributions
Supervisor: Prof Chris Jones

The supervisor of this project is someone who is at the forefront
of developing and understanding new three- and four-parameter
families of continuous distributions with a variety of skewness/
tailweight properties for use in statistics. These distributions
are of practical importance because they provide a parametric
modelling alternative to robust statistics as usually practised;
they also form components of many more complex models. The current
project will emphasise comparative issues: what are the pros and
cons of the main families of distributions as currently proposed?
Comparison of theoretical properties will form the starting point,
going on to further comparative topics which might include
consideration of issues of inference and of multivariate extension.

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