Paul D. McNicholas is an Irish-Canadian statistician. He is a professor and University Scholar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at

McMaster University McMaster University (McMaster or Mac) is a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The main McMaster campus is on of land near the residential neighbourhoods of Ainslie Wood, Ontario, Ainslie Wood and Westdale, Ontario, Westd ...

. In 2015, McNicholas was awarded the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics. McNicholas uses computational statistics techniques, and mixture models in particular, to gain insight into large and complex datasets. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Classification.

Education and career

McNicholas attended

Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Unive ...

where in 2004 he received a B.A. (Mod.) in Mathematics. He also holds an M.Sc. in High Performance Computing and a Ph.D. in Statistics. His 2007 Ph.D. thesis is entitled ''Topics in Unsupervised Learning''. McNicholas started his faculty career at University of Guelph in 2007. In 2014, he joined McMaster University. He has authored more than 100 scientific works cited over 4000 times. The majority of his research has been on

model-based clustering In statistics, cluster analysis is the algorithmic grouping of objects into homogeneous groups based on numerical measurements. Model-based clustering based on a statistical model for the data, usually a mixture model. This has several advantages, ...

, specifically in developing novel finite

mixture models In chemistry, a mixture is a material made up of two or more different chemical substances which can be separated by physical method. It is an impure substance made up of 2 or more elements or compounds mechanically mixed together in any proporti ...

for clustering and

classification Classification is the activity of assigning objects to some pre-existing classes or categories. This is distinct from the task of establishing the classes themselves (for example through cluster analysis). Examples include diagnostic tests, identif ...

of multivariate data. He has published works on clustering high-dimensional data and the use of non-Gaussian mixtures. McNicholas has published two monographs: ''Mixture Model-Based Classification'' and ''Data Science with Julia''.

Recognition

In 2017, he was inducted into the College of New Scholars Artists and Scientists of the college of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

. In 2019, he was awarded an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; , CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering research in Canada. NSERC directly funds university professors and students as ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McNicholas, Paul 1981 births Living people Irish emigrants to Canada Irish statisticians 21st-century Irish mathematicians Scientists from Cork (city) Canada Research Chairs 21st-century Canadian mathematicians Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Academic journal editors Academic staff of McMaster University Academic staff of the University of Guelph Computational statisticians