Jeffrey D Picka
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton NB E3B 5A3
Canada
Personal Information
Teaching
Information on all courses can be found on Blackboard. For further info, send an email or come by the office.
Skepicism is an important part of scientific (and hence statistical) thinking. It can help to make a distinction between what we as individuals would like to be true, and what may be thought as true by others who do not necessarily share our beliefs or pecularities. Websites set up by skeptics make good use of research (and sometimes statistical experiments and surveys) to get a clearer look at the world. Some useful sources of skeptical analyses can be found here:
Research
My research is centered on determining whether or not a random set models realizations of spatially disordered data. These data may be the stripes on a zebra, the locations of impurities in a material, or the structure of crystals formed by a rapid cooling process. The models may be germ-grain models, in which points (germs) are chosen from a point process and then sets (grains) are attached at those locations, or they may be jammed configurations of metal spheres, or they may be solutions to a set of nonlinear partial differential equations which represent a pattern-forming dynamical system. In almost no cases will it be possible to use traditional likelihood-based methods to draw conclusions from a single realization. Statistical methods are needed, since often models based on many person-years of work are fit by eye.
© Jeffrey D Picka, September 6, 2008.
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