The Biostat research group covers the research and consulting activities of the department that are related to statistics. Since the research group has its root in the Faculty of bio-engineering sciences, there is a strong relation between the applied research and the consulting activities. In particular, we often develop new statistical methodology for specific applications in biology, food technology, biotechnology, environmental sciences, ...

Some examples:

• - spatio-temporal models for the analysis of water quality data from river monitoring networks
• - experimental designs for mixture designs in food technology
• - methods for circular regression with applications to micro-encapsulation of food particles
• - ...

Apart from this more applied research, we are also active in research on more theoretical statistical methods. In particular in nonparametric statistics (goodness-of-fit, hypothesis testing, regression, ...)

Some typical publications:

• * Thas, O. and Ottoy, J.P. (2004) A Nonparametric Test for Independence Based on Sample Space Partitions. Communications in Statistics – Simulation and Computation, 33(3), 711-728.
• * Thas, O. and Rayner, J.C.W. (2005) Smooth Tests for the Zero-Inflated Poisson Distribution. Biometrics, 61(3), 808-815.
• * Deschepper, E., Thas, O. and Ottoy, J.P. Regional Residual Plots for Assessing the Fit of Linear Regression Models. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. Accepted.
• * Depypere, F., Verbeken, D., Thas, O. and Dewettinck, K. (2003). Mixture Designs Approach to the Dynamic Rheological and Uniaxial Compression Behaviour of Milk. Food Hydrocolloids, 17, 311-320.
• * Boucneau, G., Van Meirvenne, M., Thas, O. and Hofman, G. (1998). Integrating Properties of Soil Map Delineations into Ordinary Kriging. European Journal of Soil Science, 49, 213-229.
• * Clement, L., Thas, O., Vanrolleghem, P. and Ottoy, J.P. Spatio-Temporal Statistical Models for River Monitoring Networks. Water Science and Technology. Accepted.