About me

I recently completed a PhD in Statistics at the University of Warwick under the supervision of John Aston and Jim Smith, researching statistical aspects of linguistics. The research focused on functional acoustic data, canonical variate analysis, tree constraints, model search, and how these areas can be combined.

Beyond my current research, I am interested in applications of statistics which may naturally be fitted to a tree structure, biostatistics including genetics, population modelling, climate research, voting and polling theory, combinatorics and modelling of games.

I graduated in 2010 with an integrated masters in Mathematics and Statistics from Warwick. I completed a final year project titled 'Geometry of Phylogenetic Trees' under the supervision of Jim Smith.

Publications

Gaussian tree constraints applied to acoustic linguistic functional data 
N Shiers, J A D Aston, J Q Smith, J S Coleman (2016)
Journal of Multivariate Analysis (doi: 10.1016/j.jmva.2016.09.015)

The correlation space of Gaussian latent tree models and model selection without fitting
N Shiers, P Zwiernik, J A D Aston, J Q Smith (2016)
Biometrika (doi: 10.1093/biomet/asw032)

Graphical inequality diagnostics for phylogenetic trees
N Shiers, J Q Smith (2012)
Proceedings of 6th European Workshop on Probabilistic Graphical Models, Granada, Spain, 19-21 Sep 2012, pp. 291-298

Miscellaneous

Gaussian latent tree model constraints for linguistics and other applications
N Shiers (2016)
PhD thesis