Description

The StatDisTLab@UP (Statistical Distribution Theory) research group is a dynamic research group based at the Department of Statistics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria. Our research group has students at the honours level, masters level, doctoral level, and post-doctoral level. We regularly publish in journals such as Statistics in Medicine, Statistical Methods in Medical Research, Results in Mathematics, Japanese Journal of Statistics and Data Science, Annals of Operations Research, to name a few. Our research interests are versatile and interdisciplinary, spanning development of meaningful probabilistic models for insightful data analysis - constructed from fundamental and rigorous mathematical components. We collaborate across the globe with researchers of high standing and publish our work on impactful platforms.

Collaborators

UP Staff:

Johan Ferreira
Andriette Bekker
Mohammad Arashi
Arno Otto

National (non-UP) collaborators:

Delene van Wyk
Priyanka Nagar

International collaborators:

Antonio Punzo
Daniele Tomarchio
Tanita Botha
Mahdi Salehi
Janet van Niekerk
Filipe Marques

SDGs

Our research links to the following UN SDGs:

SDG 8: Decent work and economic growth
SDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure
SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities
SDG 15: Life on land

Recent published works of the group

• Otto, A.F., Bekker, A., Ferreira, J.T., and Arslan, O. 2024. "Alternative skew Laplace scale mixtures for modeling data exhibiting high-peaked and heavy-tailed traits", Japanese Journal of Statistics and Data science.
• Tomarchio, S.D., Punzo, A., Ferreira, J.T., and Bekker, A. 2024. "Mode mixture of unimodal distributions for insurance loss data", Annals of Operations Research.
• Tomarchio, S.D., Punzo, A., Ferreira, J.T., and Bekker, A. 2024. "A new look at the Dirichlet distribution: robustness, clustering, and both together", accepted, Journal of Classification.