Dr Renate Thiede is a lecturer in the Department of Statistics. She is a statistician with a focus on interdisciplinary research for sustainable urban development.

Contact: [email protected]

Research

• Research interests
  • Spatial statistics, statistics for GIS, transport infrastructure, sustainable urban development
• UN SDGs
  • SDG 9 (Industry, innovation and infrastructure)
  • SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities)
  • SDG 17 (Partnerships for the goals)
• Research grants and awards
  • 2025: Thuthuka Post-PhD Grantholder 
  • 2023: Winner of the SASA Postgraduate Unpublished Paper Competition
  • 2022: Winner of the SASA Postgraduate Paper Competition
• Peer-reviewed journal publications
  • Thiede RN, Fabris-Rotelli IN, Debba P, and Cleghorn CW. A Markov chain model for geographical accessibility, Spatial Statistics, 2023, 55, 100748.
  • Dresselhaus C, Fabris-Rotelli I, Manjoo-Docrat R, Brettenny W, Holloway J, Abdelatif N, Thiede R, Debba P, Dudeni-Tlhone N. A spatial model with vaccinations for COVID-19 in South Africa, Spatial Statistics, 2023, 100792.
  • Fabris-Rotelli I, Holloway J, Kimmie Z, Archibald S, Debba P, Docrat R, le Roux A, Dudeni-Tlhone N, Van Rensburg CJ, Thiede R, Abdelatif N. A Spatial SEIR Model for COVID-19 in South Africa, Journal of Data Science, Statistics, and Visualisation, 2022, 2(7), 14-45.
  • Potgieter A., Fabris-Rotelli I. N., Kimmie Z., Dudeni-Tlhone N., Holloway J. P., Janse van Rensburg C., Thiede R. N., Debba P., Manjoo-Docrat R., Abdelatif N., Khuluse-Makhanya S. Modelling Representative Population Mobility for COVID-19 Spatial Transmission in South Africa, Frontiers in Big Data, 2021, 4.
  • Thiede RN, Fabris-Rotelli IN, Stein A, Debba P, and Li M. Uncertainty quantification for the extraction of informal roads from remote sensing images of South Africa, South African Geographical Journal, Routledge, 2019, 0, 1-24.
• Peer-reviewed conference proceedings papers
  • R. Thiede, I. Fabris-Rotelli, P. Debba, and C. Cleghorn, Exploring the Effect of Road Network Structure on Inter-Regional Accessibility in a Diverse Road Network, ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, X-4-2024, 357–364, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-X-4-2024-357-2024, 2024. (ISPRS Technical Commission IV Symposium 2024, October 22 - 25, 2024, Fremantle, Perth, Australia)
  • Rangongo, T, Fabris-Rotelli, I, Thiede, R. Assessing classification performance for sampled remote sensing data, ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, X-4-2024. (ISPRS Technical Commission IV Symposium 2024, October 22 - 25, 2024, Fremantle, Perth, Australia)
  • Potgieter, L, Fabris-Rotelli, I, Thiede, R, Debba, P, Rautenbach, V, Kemp, J, Loggenberg, K, Munch, Z. Transferability of GANs-UNet model for informal road detection in underdeveloped areas, ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, X-4-2024. (ISPRS Technical Commission IV Symposium 2024, October 22 - 25, 2024, Fremantle, Perth, Australia)
  • Fabris-Rotelli, I., Wannenburg, A., Maribe, G., Thiede, R., Vogel, M., Coetzee, M., Sethaelo, K., Selahle, E., Debba, P., and Rautenbach, V. An informal road detection neural network for societal impact in developing countries. ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2022, 4, 267-274.

Postgraduate student supervision

• Current postgraduate students:
  • PhD: Luandrie Potgieter, Arthur Antonio
  • Masters: Marie Vogel, Tebogo Mokoena, Amy Pieters
• Graduated postgraduate students:
  • Masters: Tshepiso Rangongo, Mila Coetzee, Philasande Mdletshe, Arthur Antonio
• I have also been supervising at least 2 Honours students per year since 2020.

Teaching

• 2025: BME 780/410 (Biometry), WST 212 (Applications in Data Science), SFT 720 (Sampling Techniques)
• Before 2025: WST 322 (Actuarial Statistics), WST 312 (Stochastic Processes), WST 221 (Mathematical Statistics), WST 153 (Mathematical Statistics), WST 111 (Mathematical Statistics)