Department of Statistics

Site logo

Professor David Firth, FBA

[c]

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. He chairs the Research Section of the Royal Statistical Society, and is on the editorial boards of the journals Sociological Methodology and Political Analysis. Other recent activities have included: membership of the ESRC Research Grants Board and the National Statistics Methodology Advisory Committee; and editorship 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.

Moment of fame: on 05/05/05 he predicted perfectly the Labour majority of 66 seats at the UK General Election, for the BBC and ITV networks. The paper with John Curtice listed below gives details of how it was done.

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:
Some recent publications:

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

Search for:


David's pages:
Quick links:

ESRC NCRM EPSRC
CRiSM APTS RSS
gnm svn GnuPG
CRAN CTAN WoK
CIS DAS JSTOR

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: Tue 9 Feb 2010
Back to top of page
 

Web site search

People search

News

News.