QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 11 matching student topics
Displaying 1–11 of 11 results
Statistics via scalable Monte Carlo
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Efficient parameter estimation for agent-based models of tumour growth
Cancer is an extremely heterogeneous disease, particularly at the cellular level. Cells within a single cancerous tumour undergo vastly different rates of proliferation based on their location and specific genetic mutations. Capturing this stochasticity in cell behaviour and its effect on tumour growth is challenging with a deterministic system, e.g. ordinary differential equations, however, is possible with an agent-based model (ABM). In an ABM, cells are modelled as individual agents that have a probability of proliferation and movement in each …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Making the most of many models
In the age of Big Data, machine learning methods, and modern statistics the adage "all models are wrong but some are useful" has never been so true. This project will investigate data science approaches where more than one model makes sense for the data. Is it better to choose a single model or is there something to be gained from multiple models?This project will look at variable selection methods, penalised regression, Bayesian model averaging and conformal prediction. The research has …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Surprising genomes
Genomic sequencing has changed radically since the first public sequencing projects more than 25 years ago. The original human genome project cost more than two billion dollars; sequencing a human genome now costs as little as a thousand, and we may sequence whole viruses and bacteria as a matter of routine.The challenge now lies in rapidly analysing these genomes as they appear, and understanding quickly whether there is anything interesting in the new sequence to warrant further inquiry. This project …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Visualisation and sonification for genomic data sets
Successive revolutions in sequencing technology over the past two decades have led to an explosion in the availability of genomic data. Analysing biological datasets and identifying relationships within them is challenging - some of the process can be automated but interactive exploration offers a number of advantages, and supports serendipitous discovery.This project looks at visual analytics and sonification - the use of sound and musical encodings - to enhance our understanding of biological networks.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Unlocking the Potential of Simplex-Truncated Distributions
This PhD project aims to develop new methods for generating random samples from a specific type of probability distributions called simplex-truncated distributions. These distributions are commonly used in various fields such as statistics, machine learning, and biology.The project will involve the development of new techniques to generate random samples from simplex-truncated distributions. These techniques are based on a method called continuous-time Monte Carlo which is a cutting edge method in statistics that can generate random samples from complex distributions.The main …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Continuous time samplers (MCMC at the limit!)
The goal of this project is to develop new continuous time Monte Carlo methods for efficient sampling from high-dimensional distributions. Continuous-time Monte Carlo methods are a class of algorithms that use continuous-time dynamics to generate samples from target distributions, rather than the discrete-time dynamics used in traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. These methods have been shown to have faster mixing and better exploration of the state space, making them particularly appealing samplers for challenging distributions.The main objectives of …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Topics in computational Bayesian statistics
Bayesian statistics provide a framework for a statistical inference for quantifying the uncertainty of unknowns based on information pre and post data collection.This information is captured in the posterior distribution, which is a probability distribution over the space of unknowns given the observed data.The ability to make inferences based on the posterior essentially amounts to efficiently simulating from the posterior distribution, which can generally not be done perfectly in practice.This task of sampling may be challenging for various reasons:The posterior …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Modelling and managing uncertain Antarctic species networks
Antarctic ecosystems are complex, and data is limited since it is expensive to collect. Species including penguins, seabirds, invertebrates, mosses, and marine species interact in food webs which can be modelled as mathematical networks. These networks can be large, span across terrestrial and marine systems, and are changing in response to environmental changes.These ecological networks can be modelled using differential equation predator prey models like Lotka-Volterra to describe these interactions. However, the relationships between species are not always known, or …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment
Scalable Bayesian Inference using Multilevel Monte Carlo
Bayesian inference is a popular statistical framework for estimating the parameters of statistical models based on data. However, Bayesian methods are well known to be computationally intensive. This fact inhibits the scalability of Bayesian analysis for real-world applications involving complex stochastic models. Such models are common in the fields of biology and ecology.Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) methods are a promising class of techniques for dealing with the scalability challenge. These approaches use hierarchies of approximations to optimise the trade-off between …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
The insufficient informativeness of measurements in Bayesian detection problems
Shiryaev's Bayesian Quickest Change Detection (QCD) problem is to detect a change in the statistical problems of an observed process. This is an important signal processing problem with application in a diverse range of areas, including:automatic controlquality controlstatisticstarget detection.Recently a critical deficiency in Shiryaev's QCD problem has been identified to occur due to the insufficient informativeness of measurement in low signal-to-noise (SNR) to overcome geometric prior assumption on the change event.These deficiencies are due to the non-ergodic nature of the …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Contact us
If you have questions about the best options for you, the application process, your research topic, finding a supervisor or anything else, get in touch with us today.