Department of Statistics

Statistics

Professor David Firth FBA (Deputy Chair)

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David Firth works on statistical theory, methods and computation, and applications in many disciplines, especially the social sciences.

He is co-director of the EPSRC Academy for PhD Training in Statistics, a member of the management team of the Warwick/EPSRC Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology (CRiSM), and a member of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods in social science. Other recent activities have included chairing the Research Section of the Royal Statistical Society, and membership of the ESRC Research Grants Board and the National Statistics Methodology Advisory Committee. He is a former Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B, Statistical Methodology). In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

David came to Warwick in 2003 from Oxford, where he was Professor of Social Statistics.

Election exit polls

David's research work is behind the accurate exit-poll predictions that have been made at the last three UK general elections (in 2001, 2005 and 2010). For more details see exit polling explained.

Current research topics:

  • inference and computation for generalized nonlinear models (with Heather Turner);
  • inference and computation for complex random-effects models (with Mohand Feddag, Cristiano Varin and Heather Turner);
  • models of competition and the analysis of pair-comparison data (with Cristiano Varin);
  • penalized likelihood methods, especially for modelling discrete data (with Ioannis Kosmidis and Patrick Ho).

News:
Office hours:

Term 3, 2009-10 (from week 2): Monday 1130–1230, Thursday 1430–1530.

Some recent publications:

Kuha, J and Firth, D (2010). On the index of dissimilarity for lack of fit in log-linear and log-multiplicative models. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, in press.

Kosmidis, I and Firth, D (2009). Bias reduction in exponential family nonlinear models. Biometrika 96, 793--804.

Curtice, J and Firth, D (2008). Exit polling in a cold climate: The BBC/ITV experience in Britain in 2005. Read at RSS Ordinary Meeting on 17 Oct 2007, and published (with discussion) in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 171, 509–539.

Sergeant, J C and Firth, D (2006). Relative index of inequality: Definition, estimation and inference. Biostatistics 7, 213–224.

Whiting, M J, Stuart-Fox, D M, O'Connor, D, Firth, D, Bennett, N C and Blomberg, S P (2006). Ultraviolet signals ultra-aggression in a lizard. Animal Behaviour 72, 353–363.

Stuart-Fox, D M, Firth, D, Moussalli, A and Whiting, M J (2006). Multiple signals in chameleon contests: designing and analysing animal contests as a tournament. Animal Behaviour 71, 1263–1271.

Firth, D (2005). Some Topics in Social Statistics. In Celebrating Statistics: Papers in Honour of Sir David Cox on his 80th Birthday (eds. A C Davison, Y Dodge, N Wermuth). OUP.

Firth, D (2005). Bradley-Terry models in R. Journal of Statistical Software 12(1), 1–12.

Firth, D. and Menezes, R. X. de (2004). Quasi-variances. Biometrika 91, 65–80.

Firth, D. (2003). Overcoming the reference category problem in the presentation of statistical models. Sociological Methodology 33, 1–18.

Firth, D. (2003). CGIwithR: Facilities for processing web forms using R. Journal of Statistical Software 8(10), 1–8.

Wolfe, R. and Firth, D. (2002). Modelling subjective use of an ordinal response scale in a many period crossover experiment. Applied Statistics 51, 245–255.
Photo of David Firth

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Contact information:

Professor D Firth
Dept of Statistics
University of Warwick
Coventry, CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

Voice:
+44 (0)247 657 2581
Fax:
+44 (0)247 652 4532
Email:
d dot firth at warwick dot ac dot uk
PGP public key:
df-key.txt
Page contact: Paula Matthews Last revised: Thu 29 Jul 2010
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