Home

My Group

Publications

Teaching

Software

Interesting Things

Who am I? What do I do? Imagine you're trying to guess the price of a car. You are provided with various pieces of information, like the make and model, year of manufacture, etc. In solving any given problem like this, some pieces of information are relevant, some are irrelevant, and some are redundant in the context of others. In the car example, the number of miles on the clock clearly matters, while the colour of the wheel trim probably does not. The age of the car is probably redundant if you know the mileage. You know this because you (probably) know something about cars. What about predicting whether someone will have a relapse of a particular cancer? What things matter? Genetic factors? Lifestyle? Metabolic? In my field we use statistical methods to identify these factors, known as ``features'', automatically. In particular I work on information theory and probabilistic methods. Recently, I am particularly interested in incorporating prior (human) knowledge into the statistical processes.