Explore our Statistics taught Master's degree.

Page updates

We may have revised the information on this page since publication. See the edits we have made and content history.

P-G4P1

MSc

1 year full-time

30 September 2024

Statistics

University of Warwick

Available as an MSc, Warwick's Statistics course aims to cover topics most relevant to a career as a professional statistician. Your training will open the way to employment in many sectors, including marketing, insurance, banking and pharmaceutical industry. It may also provide the pathway to a research degree (PhD).

The programme aims to cover topics most relevant to a career as a professional statistician. This training opens the way to employment in many sectors of the economy and public services including medical, health and life sciences, marketing, insurance, banking and pharmaceutical industry, quality management and analytics for business and manufacturing, national and local government.

You will receive practical and theoretical training in two core modules and further specialisation as well as broader knowledge in six optional modules of your choice.

After completing successfully the taught portion of the course, you will continue for a further ten weeks to put your knowledge into practice through a dissertation.

For further details, see here.

For the nine-month period from October to June, you will be engaged in attending a set of modules ranging across the spectrum of the most fundamental areas of Statistics and Probability.  

After successfully completing the taught portion of the Master’s you will undertake a dissertation project under supervision of a member of staff.

Class Size

Contact Hours

Assessment is initially made for each module separately: some modules have an element of continuous assessment through coursework, but the majority of modules are assessed through written examinations in May and June or, for some modules, January.

Your performance in the core and optional modules combined is then examined by an examinations board consisting of academic staff plus an External Examiner appointed from another university. Dissertations are examined in the Department and then by the External Examiner.

The MSc degree is awarded subject to satisfactory standard in the dissertation and taught modules. Students who do outstandingly well in both taught modules and the dissertation may be awarded the MSc with Distinction or Merit.

Your timetable

Your personalised timetable will be complete when you are registered for all modules, compulsory and optional, and you have been allocated to your lectures, seminars and other small group classes. Your compulsory modules will be registered for you and you will be able to choose your optional modules when you join us.

2:1 undergraduate degree (or equivalent) in Statistics, Mathematics or a science with sufficiently high mathematical content.

• Band A
• No score lower than 6.0 in all IELTS fields with a total score of 6.5 minimum.

There are no additional entry requirements for this course.

Statistical Methods

The module content will include a thorough grounding in classical and Bayesian methods of statistical inference with an introduction to selected modern developments in statistical methodology. Since MSc students have different background knowledge in statistics, we start afresh although a solid mathematical background is assumed. At the end of the course you will have a solid background in basic concepts of statistical methodology and knowledge at an advanced level in some areas.

An Introduction to Statistical Practice

Introduction to Statistical Practice module introduces statistical computing, using R, through hands-on practical classes on the analysis of real data from a variety of scientific and other disciplines; and develops skills such as report-writing, statistical graphics, etc.

Dissertation

After successfully completing the taught part of the programme the student also undertakes a substantial project under the supervision of a Department member, and writes a dissertation reporting the results. Such projects can be in any of the areas covered by the MSc, including applied statistics, statistical methodology, computational methods, probability etc.

Optional modules

The remaining six modules are chosen from a wide range of options, subject to availability, to suit the interests of individual students. The options include:

Advanced Topics in Data Science

This module comprises three selected topics in statistics and computer science. The topics may change from year to year, some examples from previous years have included Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing, Decision Trees and Random Forests, Model Comparison and Selection, Artificial Neural Networks, Introduction to Reinforcement Learning and Modelling the Written Word: Compression and Human-Computer-Interfaces.

Bayesian Forecasting and Intervention with Advanced Topics

Forecasting is a vital prerequisite to decision making. This course offers a very powerful fundamental probabilistic approach to forecasting, controlling and learning about uncertain commercial, financial, economic, production, environmental and medical dynamic systems. The theory will be illustrated by real examples from industry, marketing, finance, government, agriculture etc. A familiarity with the material in this module will be very useful to all students planning a career involving a component of industrial, business or government statistics.

Applied Stochastic Processes with Advanced Topics

This module provides introduction to concepts and techniques which are fundamental in modern applied probability theory and operations research: Models for queues, point processes, and epidemics. Furthermore, you will study notions of equilibrium, threshold behaviour, and description of structure. The ideas presented in this module have a vast range of applications, for example routing algorithms in telecommunications (queues), assessment of apparent spatial order in astronomical data (stochastic geometry), and description of outbreaks of disease (epidemics).

Medical Statistics with Advanced Topics

Modern applications of statistics to medicine are highly developed, and many medical research papers employ statistical techniques. Large numbers of statisticians are employed in medical research establishments, particularly in pharmaceutical companies and medical schools. Medical statistics continues to be a buoyant area for statistical recruitment. The course will explain why and how statistics is used in medicine, and study some of the statistical methods commonly used in medical research. We will include examples from our own research. The statistical techniques applied to medical data are also relevant in other applications.

Monte Carlo Methods

When modelling real world phenomena statisticians are often confronted with the following dilemma: should we choose a standard model that is easy to compute with or use a more realistic model that is not amenable to analytic computations such as determining means and p-values. We are faced with such choice in a vast variety of application areas, some of which we will encounter in this module. These include financial models, genetics, polymer simulation, target tracking, statistical image analysis and missing data problems. With the advent of modern computer technology, we are no longer restricted to standard models as we can use simulation-based inference.

Designed Experiments with Advanced Topics

Designed experiments are used in industry, agriculture, medicine and many other areas of activity to test hypotheses, to learn about processes and to predict future responses. The primary purpose of experimentation is to determine the relationship between a response variable and the settings of a number of experimental variables (or factors) that are presumed to affect it. Experimental design is the discipline of determining the number and order (spatial or temporal) of experimental runs, and the setting of the experimental variables.

Multivariate Statistics with Advanced Topics

Multivariate data arises whenever several interdependent variables are measured simultaneously. Such high-dimensional data is becoming the rule, rather than the exception in many areas including medicine, social and environmental sciences and economics. The analysis of such multidimensional data often presents an exciting challenge that requires new statistical techniques which are usually implemented using computer packages. This module aims to give you a good and rigorous understanding of the geometric and algebraic ideas that these techniques are based on, before giving you a chance to try them out on some real data sets.

For further modules, see here.