Statistics – (M.Sc.)

Statistics is an exciting subject with a rapidly increasing uptake in industry, commerce, government and academia. More and more professions, from the everyday to the exotic, depend on data and numerical reasoning. Data are not just numbers, but numbers that carry information about a specific setting and need to be interpreted within that setting. With the growth in the use of data comes a growing demand for the services of statisticians, although, as stated by the Royal Statistical Society, there is a lack of statisticians across all areas of applications in the UK and internationally. The need is especially pronounced in the finance, insurance and pharmaceutical industries. To help meet the demand for well trained statisticians, the School of Computing Sciences, in close collaboration with the School of Medicine and the School of Economics, offers a 1-year MSc in Statistics. Students will have the ability to choose specialist pathways out of medical, finance/insurance or knowledge discovery. The programme will prepare you for employment across a range of industries and for further education through a PhD in order to pursue a career in industrial or academic research.

The MSc Statistics is normally a 12-month full-time intensive course but may be studied part-time over 24 months.

The course develops statistical thinking and provides training in the advanced aspects of statistical theory as well as familiarising students with applications of statistics and exposure to practical problems. Particular attention is given to statistical computing, with a core module in the first semester, and exposure to R and SAS statistical programming languages throughout the course. SAS is an industry standard both in pharmaceutical and in the financial services industry. R is a free flexible statistical environment used extensively in academia and in Research and Development.

The course is broadly divided into three parts. The first part is a set of core modules that are taught in the first semester. These include Computational Statistics, Inference, Statistical Modelling and Multivariate Analysis. The second part comprises specialised pathways in either financial statistics, medical statistics or knowledge discovery and takes place in the second semester. This allows students to build on or broaden their existing knowledge. The third part of the course is a three-month research project that is written up in the form of a dissertation. This may be based on a placement in a pharmaceutical or financial/insurance company. Part-time students follow a similar structure, except that the modules are spread over four semesters plus two summers.