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 and Westdale, adjacent to the Royal Botanical Ga ...

. 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 ''Journal of Classification'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. It is the official journal of The Classification Society. The journal publishes three issues a year on topics in the field of classifica ...

Education and career

McNicholas attended

Trinity College Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

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, specifically in developing novel finite

mixture models In statistics, a mixture model is a probabilistic model for representing the presence of subpopulations within an overall population, without requiring that an observed data set should identify the sub-population to which an individual observatio ...

for clustering and

classification Classification is a process related to categorization, the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Classification is the grouping of related facts into classes. It may also refer to: Business, organizat ...

multivariate Multivariate may refer to: In mathematics * Multivariable calculus * Multivariate function * Multivariate polynomial In computing * Multivariate cryptography * Multivariate division algorithm * Multivariate interpolation * Multivariate optical c ...

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; french: Société royale du Canada, 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, bil ...

. 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; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

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