I conduct research in statistics and teach statistics to undergraduate and graduate students. 

I am co-director of the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training (CRT) in Foundations of Data Science, with co-directors Prof. James Gleeson (UL) and Prof. David Malone (MU). Our CRT will train over 120 PhD students from 2019 to 2026 in the foundations of data science. I am a Principal Investigator in the VistaMilk Research Centre for Precision Pasture-based Dairying and a Funded Investigator in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics.

My research develops novel, apposite statistical methods, largely based on latent variable models, for the analysis of high dimensional data, often of mixed type. The methods I develop are often motivated by and solve applied problems across a range of disciplines, including epigenetics, metabolomics, genomics, social science, sports science and political science. 

News!

June 2025

• Enjoyed presenting our work on Bayesian nonparametric models for network data at the Lancaster University Computational Statistics and Machine Learning group.

May 2025

• Now published (open access) in Stat: `Variational Inference for the Latent Shrinkage Position Model' with Xian Yao Gwee and Michael Fop.

April 2024

• Delighted to deliver a talk on `Bayesian nonparametric modelling of network data' as part of the  Young Statisticians’ Section of the Irish Statistical Association's session on Bayesian Statistics. An energetic and innovative group!

February 2024

• A pleasure to give a talk on `A Bayesian nonparametric model for binary and count network data 'at the Queen's University Belfast Mathematical Sciences Research Centre colloquium talk series.

November 2023

•  New preprint `Variational Inference for the Latent Shrinkage Position Model' with Xian Yao Gwee and Michael Fop available on arXiv. 

October 2023

• New preprint `Model-based Clustering for Network Data via a Latent Shrinkage Position Cluster Model' with Xian Yao Gwee and Michael Fop available on arXiv. 

September 2023

• To appear in Bayesian Analysis: `A latent shrinkage position model for binary and count network data' with Xian Yao Gwee and Michael Fop.

July 2023

• New preprint on `Predicting milk traits from spectral data using Bayesian probabilistic partial least squares regression' with Szymon Urbas, Pierre Lovera, Robert Daly, Alan O’Riordan and Donagh Berry, funded by the VistaMilk SFI research centre.

June 2023

• Updated preprint `A latent shrinkage position model for binary and count network data' with Xian Yao Gwee and Michael Fop available on arXiv. 

March 2023

• Our review article on `Model-Based Clustering' is now published (open access) in Annual Reviews of Statistics and its Applications, with Brendan Murphy (UCD) and Adrian Raftery (University of Washington).

January 2023

• New open access paper `MetaboVariation: Exploring Individual Variation in Metabolite Levels' with Shubbham Gupta (a CRT funded PhD student) and Prof. Lorraine Brennan published in Metabolites. Open-source software is available to implement the MetaboVariation approach!

December 2022

• New  pre-print with Xian Yao Gwee and Michael Fop on arXiv: A latent shrinkage position model for binary and count network data. 

• Open for applications for the 2023 cohort of PhD students funded by the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science. Apply at www.data-science.ie.

November 2022

• New  pre-print with Koyel Majumdar, Brendan Murphy, Romina Silva, Antoinette Perry and Bill Watson, all UCD, on arXiv: betaclust: a family of mixture models for beta valued DNA methylation data.

• Thanks to the Royal Statistical Society's Glasgow Local Group for the invitation to present `betaclust: a family of mixture models for beta-valued DNA methylation data'. This is the work of our CRT funded PhD student Koyel Majumdar in collaboration with Romina Silva, Antoinette Perry, Bill Watson and Brendan Murphy, and it's available on arXiv.

• Thanks to Maria Kalli of King's College London for the invitation to give a seminar on `A latent shrinkage position model for binary and count network data' which is collaborative work with CRT funded PhD student Xian Yao Gwee and Dr Michael Fop. Soon to appear on arXiv...

September 2022

• Thanks to Cristina Tortora for the invitation to present at the European Conference on Data Analysis, would have been nice to visit Naples but appreciated the opportunity to present remotely.

August 2022

• Great to be welcoming the 2022 cohort of PhD students funded by the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science to the Foundations of Data Science I startup lectures in-person, in the  University of Limerick this year.

July 2022

• Presented `A family of mixture models for beta valued DNA methylation data' at the 2022 Working Group in Model-Based Clustering, online this year! Joint work with Koyel Majumdar, Brendan Murphy, Romina Silva, Antoinette Perry and Bill Watson, all UCD. This work is funded by the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science.

June 2022

• Off to Montreal to the world meeting of the International Society for Bayesian Analysis - thanks to Antonio Canale & Bernardo Nipoti for the invitation to present as part of their session on Advances in Bayesian factor models.

May 2022

• Yay, CASI (Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland) is back and in person. Great to meet the Irish statistical community again. Thanks to UCC for hosting such a great event with excellent statistical research presented.

•  VistaMilk internal conference in Cork. Great overview of the broad science taking place in the research centre.

April 2022

• Wonderful `Data on the Lake' event in Lancaster - a collaboration between the SFI CRT in Foundations of Data Science PhD students and PhD students from the STOR-i CDT in Lancaster. Great talks and data dive with the food charity FareShare.

March 2022

• Excellent masterclass for our CRT from Prof Grant Lythe from University of  Leeds on `Computational models in immunology', in person!!

February 2022

• Paper `Combining biomarker and food intake data' with Dr Silvia D'Angelo and Prof. Lorraine Brennan now published in the Wiley StatsRef series.

January 2022

• Annual Winter Symposium for our CRT's year 1 cohort of PhD students. A pity it's online again, but a great event for students, supervisors and industry partners.

• Back at the BT Young Science and Technology exhibition. The virtual event doesn't dampen the students' enthusiasm or quality! 

December 2021

• Paper `Selecting Milk Spectra to Develop Equations to Predict Milk Technological Traits' will PhD student Maria Frizzarin as lead author, in collaboration with Dr Alessandro Casa (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and Dr Sinéad McParland (Teagasc) now published.

• Paper `Computational modelling of chromosomally clustering protein domains in bacteria' with  Dr Chiara E. Cotroneo,  Prof. Denis C. Shields and Dr Michael Salter-Townshend now published in BMC Bioinformatics.

November 2021

• Enjoy giving a talk on `Career Trajectories of Northern Irish Youths:  Clustering Longitudinal Life-course Sequences using Mixtures of Exponential-distance Models' at the Workshop on Quantitative Methods at the University of Glasgow.

October 2021

• Nice to be back at the Working Group in Model-based Clustering albeit on Zoom to present research on `Clustering Longitudinal Life-Course Sequences using Mixtures of Exponential-Distance Models'.

• New paper Clustering longitudinal life-course sequences using mixtures of exponential-distance models just appeared in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society). A great collaboration with Keefe Murphy (MU), Brendan Murphy (UCD) and Raffaella Piccarreta (Bocconi).

• Paper `Genome-wide association analyses of carcass traits using copy number variants and raw intensity values of single nucleotide polymorphisms in cattle' lead by former PhD student Dr Pierce Rafter published in BMC Genomics.

September 2021

• New paper multiMarker: software for modelling and prediction of continuous food intake using multiple biomarkers measurements just appeared in BMC Bioinformatics with Dr. Silvia D'Angelo, Prof. Lorraine Brennan and Aoife McNamara.

• With thanks to MSc Data and Computational Science student Kate Finucane the MetSizeR package has been resurrected, and has a shiny new Shiny version!

• Just enjoyed the excellent Cladag 2021 conference. Delighted to present our work as part of Dr. Monia Ranalli's invited session on `Modern likelihood methods for model-based clustering'.

• And we're off! Great to be back to in-person lectures with the Foundations of Data Science I startup lectures for the 2021 CRT students, hosted this year in UCD. 

July 2021

• Looking forward to meeting (virtually) our incoming, diverse cohort of 33 PhD students who make up the 2021 cohort of students in the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science.

June 2021

• Presenting `Advances in model-based clustering of high-dimensional data' as part of the invited session on `New proposals for clustering complex data structures' at the EcoSta2021 conference in Hong Kong (via Zoom unfortunately!).

May 2021

• Paper `Inferring food intake from multiple biomarkers using a latent variable model' with  Dr. Silvia D'Angelo and Prof. Lorraine Brennan will appear in the Annals of Applied Statistics. 

• Paper `Clustering Longitudinal Life-Course Sequences using Mixtures of Exponential-Distance Models' with Dr. Keefe Murphy, Prof.  Brendan Murphy, Prof. Raffaella Piccarreta will appear in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A Statistics in Society. 

April 2021

• Congratulations to Maria Frizzarin, joint PhD student between Teagasc and UCD on her paper `Predicting cow milk quality traits from routinely available milk spectra using statistical machine learning methods' which has just appeared in the Journal of Dairy Science.

March 2021

• Very grateful to Prof. Brendan Murphy  (UCD) for his excellent masterclass on `Model-based clustering and classification' for our SFI Centre for Research Training (CRT) in Foundations of Data Science PhD students and Enterprise Alliance partners. Highly recommend his book!

January 2021

• Yet again astounded by the enthusiasm, commitment and talent of the upcoming generations of scientists, visible to all this year through the virtual BT Young Scientist and Technology exhibition. Honoured to be a judge in this remarkable and inspiring event.

December 2020

• Foundations of Data Science II, the second of our block taught training modules this trimester, for the 2020 SFI CRT in Foundations of Data Science cohort of students and Enterprise Alliance members is underway. Two weeks of excellent virtual but interactive afternoons ahead.

November 2020

• Very grateful to Prof. Eric Kolaczyk (Boston University) for delivering an excellent masterclass on Topics in the Statistical Analysis of Network Data over two afternoons via Zoom to our SFI Centre for Research Training PhD students and Enterprise Alliance employees. An excellent introduction and deep dive into the topical area of network modelling.

October 2020

•  Our paper "A bumpy journey: exploring deep Gaussian mixture models" was accepted for a poster and a short oral presentation at the ICBINB workshop at NeurIPS 2020. Nice news for Margot Selosse ahead of her thesis defense! Enjoyable collaboration with Margot, Julien Jacques and Christophe Biernacki. 

September 2020

• Better virtual than not at all! Many thanks to the organisers for re-scheduling the final COSTNET conference. Not the same as in person, but still a pleasure to present our approach to computationally inferring a gene regulatory network in M. abscessus.

• A warm (virtual) welcome to the 34 PhD students in the 2020 cohort in the SFI CRT in Foundations of Data Science. Looking forward to working with another excellent cohort of future research leaders.

August 2020

• I'm advertising a 2-year SFI Insight Centre for Data Analytics funded postdoctoral researcher position to develop statistical methods to detect biomarkers in vibrational spectra, towards early diagnosis of neurological disease with UCD Centre for Physics in  Health and Medicine researchers. Apply by 1st Sept 2020 at www.ucd.ie/workatucd/jobs ref. no. 012570.

July 2020

• New preprint `Inferring food intake from multiple biomarkers using a latent variable model' with Dr. Silvia D'Angelo and Prof. Lorraine Brennan now available on arXiv. Associated R package multiMarker also available.

June 2020

• Delighted for former PhD student Dr. Keefe Murphy on winning the 2020  Classification Society Distinguished Dissertation Award. Would have been nice to hear the associated Distinguished Dissertation Award lecture at the annual meeting this month in the USA, but next year!It was great few years collaborating with Keefe and co-supervisor Brendan Murphy.

May 2020

• Best of luck to all our students doing exams in very challenging circumstances.

April 2020

• Great discussion in the webinar on `Bias/fairness in Artificial Intelligence' hosted by the WISDOM (Women In Society Doing Operational research and Management Science) EURO (European Operational Research Societies) forum. Thanks to Dr. Paula Carroll for the invitation to contribute.

March 2020

• Seminars and conferences cancelled due to the corona virus epidemic. All teaching and assessment moved online. Take care, and stay home.

February 2020

• Visiting the Department of Mathematical Sciences in the University of Essex to give a seminar.

• Applications are open for 30 PhD positions (September 2020 start)  in our  SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science.  See www.data-science.ie and @data_science_ie for application details. Come join us!

January 2020

•  The inaugural Winter Symposium of the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science will take place in UCD on Thursday-Friday January 16th-17th 2020. Looking forward to welcoming the University of Limerick and Maynooth University student cohorts and supervisors to UCD.

• Looking forward to serving as a judge at the 2020 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. An inspiring way to start a new year.

December 2019

• The second of our block taught weeks of training  for the SFI CRT in Foundations of Data Science cohort of students and Enterprise Alliance members is underway.

November 2019

• Off to QUB to present at the Royal Statistical Society Northern Ireland Local Group on statistical methods for `Combining biomarker and self-report dietary intake data'.

October 2019

• Many thanks to Prof. Muriel Medard (MIT) for her absorbing and inspiring masterclass ` A compressed introduction to compression' as part of the training programme in our SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science.  Great to see so many PhD students and Enterprise Alliance members there.

September 2019

• Presenting `Recent advances in model-based clustering of high-dimensional data' at CLADAG 2019 in Cassino, Italy. This is the meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis group of the Societa Italiana di Statistica.

• Delighted to begin the SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science. Welcome to our new cohort of PhD students! Updates on @data_science_ie

• New paper presenting our `BINDER' method for computationally inferring a gene regulatory network for Mycobacterium abscessus has just appeared in BMC Bioinformatics.

August 2019

• New paper Infinite Mixtures of Infinite Factor Analysers with Keefe Murphy and Cinzia Viroli has been accepted for publication in Bayesian Analysis. Great news for Keefe just before he submits his PhD thesis!

July 2019

• Great week as always at the 2019 Working Group in Model-based Clustering, in Vienna.

June 2019

• Heading to the Classification Society 2019 meeting in Edmonton, Canada to give the President's Invited Address - many thanks to Prof. Paul McNicholas  of McMaster for the invitation!

May 2019

• New paper on investigating parameter uncertainty in model-based clustering using a weighted-likelihood bootstrap approach has been accepted for publication in Computational Statistics. 

April 2019

• Looking forward to visiting collaborator Prof. Raffaella Picccarreta of Bocconi University, Milan and giving a seminar in their Department of Decision Sciences.

March 2019

• Applications are open for PhD positions in our newly announced SFI Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science. Excited to co-lead this transformative PhD training programme with Prof. James Gleeson (UL) and Prof. Ken Duffy (MU).  See www.data-science.ie for application details. Come join us!

February 2019

• New paper with Prof. Lorraine Brennan on combining biomarker and self-reported dietary intake data accepted for publication in Statistical Methods in Medical Research. 

January 2019

• Looking forward to serving as a judge at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2019 . I'm probably as excited as the students! 

December 2018

• Best of luck to all STAT10050 students taking their final exam.

• Giving a seminar on `Model-based clustering for high dimensional data' in DIT,  soon to be TUD.

November 2018

• Presenting a talk `Combining biomarker and self-report dietary intake data: a review of the state of the art and exposition of statistical concepts' at our own UCD Working Group in Statistical Learning. This is recent work with UCD's Prof. Lorraine Brennan.

• Delighted that our new postdoctoral researcher Silvia D'Angelo has arrived, jointly working with Prof. Lorraine Brennan and me on the development of statistical methods to use metabolomic biomarkers to account for measurement error in dietary assessment. Welcome Silvia!

October 2018

• Off to the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute to give a (live streamed!) seminar.

September 2018

• Great to attend MBC2 (Workshop on Model-based Clustering and Classification) in Universita di Catania, Italy and present on infinite mixtures of infinite factor models.

• Delighted to welcome Despoina Stamatopoulou as a visiting Erasmus MSc Statistics student from the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. We'll be working with Prof. Dimitris Karlis on composite likelihood approaches for finite multivariate Gaussian mixtures. Enjoy Dublin Despoina!

August 2018

• The organising committee for the Women in Mathematics Day 2018 are hard at work getting ready the for day itself on Wednesday August 29th. Looking forward to it!

July 2018

• Visiting the excellent Department of Statistics, University of Warwick as PhD external examiner for Jairo Fuquene Patino. His thesis on `Finite mixture modelling with non-local priors' was supervised by Prof. Mark Steel and Prof. David Rossell.

June 2018

• Delighted to post a preprint of our forthcoming book chapter on `Mixtures of Experts Models'. Honoured to be a co-author of the eminent Professor Sylvia Frühwirth-Schnatter, Vienna University of Economics and Business.

• Wanted! Postdoctoral Research Fellow @UCDMathStat and @insight_centre and @metabomarkers. Seeking a postdoctoral research fellow in statistics to work on (ERC funded) A-DIET which aims to develop novel strategies for statistical assessment of dietary intake. See job ref 010467 at http://www.ucd.ie/workatucd/jobs/ 

May 2018

• Updated version 1.2 of MEclustnet, our R package that implements community finding in social network data with the help of covariates, is now available on CRAN. Includes a US political Twitter network example which finds communities which differ on political party and role.

• Also new and improved version 2.0.0 of IMIFA, our R package that implements the infinite mixtures of infinite factor analysers and related models, is now available on CRAN.

• New and improved version of our Infinite Mixtures of Infinite Factor Analysers paper, with Keefe Murphy (UCD) and Cinzia Viroli (U Bologna) has just been posted on arXiv.

April 2018

• Delighted to have Dr. James Staley, University of Bristol, here on a week long research visit. We're developing approaches to modelling high dimensional DNA methylation data from epigenetic studies. Collaboration with Prof. Kate Tilling, from Bristol's MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit.

March 2018

• Attending the meeting of Council of the Royal Statistical Society in Errol Street, London on March 21st - an active and necessary society.

February 2018

• Attending a COST Academy event (Working with the media) in Brussels as Science Communications Officer for the COST Action on statistical network models, COSTNET.

January 2018

• Updated version of our paper Investigation of Parameter Uncertainty in Clustering Using a Gaussian Mixture Model Via Jackknife, Bootstrap and Weighted Likelihood Bootstrap has been posted on arXiv. Co-authored by Adrian O'Hagan, Brendan Murphy (both UCD) and Luca Scrucca (Università degli Studi di Perugia).

December 2017

• My paper Clustering high dimensional mixed data to uncover sub-phenotypes: joint analysis of phenotypic and genotypic data with Damien McParland, Catherine Phillips, Lorraine Brennan and Helen Roche has just been published in Statistics in Medicine.

• Back to work after maternity leave and back to reality!

January 2017

• Gone on maternity leave on January 20th 2017, so updates to my website may be less frequent.

• New paper on `Infinite Mixtures of Infinite Factor Analysers: Nonparametric Model-Based Clustering via Latent Gaussian Models' co-authored by my PhD student Keefe Murphy and Prof. Cinzia Viroli, University of Bologna, has just been uploaded on arXiv. Have a read here. 

December 2016

• Congratulations to postdoctoral researcher Dr. Mark O'Connell on passing his PhD viva voce exam!

• Looking forward to presenting at the Harvesting Knowledge: big data in agriculture and food symposium, hosted by the UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science on Tuesday December 13th 2016. Nice mix of presentations from academia and industry.

November 2016

• Mark O'Connell has just joined Dr. Adrian O'Hagan and me as a Research Assistant to work on our MBCbigP research project, in collaboration with Dr. Luisa Zuccolo and her colleagues in the Integrative Epidemiology Unit in the University of Bristol. This work develops a model based clustering approach to analysing high dimensional epigenetic data. Welcome, Mark!

October 2016

• Delighted and honoured to have been elected to Council of the Royal Statistical Society for 2017. Looking forward to a productive four year term.

• New R package released: MEclustnet. The package fits a mixture of experts latent position cluster model to network data. Try it to reproduce the results of analyzing a network of lawyers (as done in our paper here) or to analyze the Twitter network between some current US politicians - have a look at the examples in the help files!

• Many thanks to Thomas Tierney, our Insight summer intern student (supervised by Dr. Damien McParland, Prof. Katherine Blake and me) who produced a Shiny application version of our R package, clustMD. Now there's no excuse not to use clustMD to cluster your mixed data, all you need is an internet browser!

September 2016

• Post doctoral research position available. The one year post will involve the development of statistical models for clustering epigenetic DNA methylation data. Interested? See a copy of the advertisement here, and apply here.

• CASI 2017 (Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland, 2017) hosted by UCD is launched. See here for details.

• Have a look at the new website for COSTNET, the COST Action CA15109, for which I am dissemination coordinator.

• New PhD student Yuxin Bai (Leo) has started with Professor Lorraine Brennan and myself. Welcome!

July 2016

• I'm attending the "Working Group on Model-Based Clustering" summer meeting in Universite Paris Descartes. Slides from my talk "MBCbigP: model-based clustering for high dimensional data" are available here.

June 2016

• I'm giving a seminar at the University of Bologna entitled "Clustering high-dimensional mixed data: joint analysis of phenotypic and genotypic data". Slides from my talk are available here.

• I'm giving a seminar at the University of Warwick on "Clustering high-dimensional mixed data: joint analysis of phenotypic and genotypic data". Slides from my talk are available here.

May 2016

• I'm attending the Conference on Applied Statistics in Ireland (CASI) 2016. Congratulations to my PhD student Keefe Murphy for winning a Best Poster prize!

• I'm attending the inaugural Management Committee meeting for COST Action COSTNET (CA15109) in Brussels. I was ratified at the meeting as the Dissemination Co-ordinator for the Action.