Amber Tomas

Contact Details

Department of Statistics
1 South Parks Road
Oxford
OX1 3TG
UK
email: tomas at stats.ox.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1865 272867
office: 2.301 (in 2 South Parks Road)

I am currently a departmental lecturer and coordinator of the M.Sc. in Applied Statistics at the University of Oxford.

Research

My research activities tend to be related to pattern recognition, network modelling and sampling, though I am interested in most aspects of statistical modelling and estimation. More information on my research and links to publications can be found on my research page.

Teaching

• The Statistical Methods page contains links to lecture notes and other course materials for that course.
• The timetable for Case Studies presentations is now available.
• In Hilary term I will be teaching Multivariate Analysis.

M.Sc. in Applied Statistics

"The MSc in Applied Statistics is a 12-month taught Masters degree running from October to September each academic year. It has an emphasis on statistics as an applied subject and includes a dissertation describing work on an applied project. The MSc gives extensive hands-on experience of analysis of real data though weekly practical classes and has a particular focus on modern computationally intensive methods".

Current students may find the following links useful:

• You will be expected to undertake further reading to supplement the lectures. Oxford has an extensive collection of books and journals, and links to the catalogue and other resources such as e-journals can be found here.
• Throughout the year the Oxford University Computing Service (OUCS) runs training courses on programming and other subjects which may be of interest. Their homepage also contains other useful information such as how to obtain access to university pages from home.
• During term the Language Centre (OULC) runs courses in languages other than English for students wishing to learn or improve their foreign language skills. They also run a number of courses under the banner of "English for Academic Studies" which are aimed at international students who would like to improve their English language skills. To participate in these courses you must register in 0th week! There is also a very well-equipped library for self-study.
• The course contains a large practical component, and all practical work will use the statistical software language "R". This is software is freely available and can be downloaded from the R homepage, as can a number of manuals. You may also find the archive of R-help and the R graph gallery of use.
• You will need to write a number of reports throughout the year, as well as the dissertation. It is strongly recommended that you use Latex for all type-set work. Although it may seem cumbersome at first, the time spent learning the basics will be well worth it. There is an example latex document here, which produces the following output. You may prefer to use pdflatex, which produces pdf output. There are many good tutorials available on the WWW.