| Paul McNicholas | |
| Alma Mater: | Trinity College Dublin |
| Known For: | Classification, clustering, mixture models |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Thomas Brendan Murphy, Myra O'Regan[1] |
| Workplaces: | University of Guelph McMaster University |
| Fields: | Statistics |
| Nationality: | Irish, Canadian |
| Birth Name: | Paul David McNicholas |
Paul D. McNicholas is an Irish-Canadian statistician. He is a professor and University Scholar in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University.[2] In 2015, McNicholas was awarded the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics.[3] McNicholas uses computational statistics techniques, and mixture models in particular, to gain insight into large and complex datasets.[4] He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Classification.[5]
McNicholas attended Trinity College Dublin where in 2004 he received a B.A. (Mod.) in Mathematics. He also holds an M.Sc. in High Performance Computing and a Ph.D. in Statistics.[6] His 2007 Ph.D. thesis is entitled Topics in Unsupervised Learning.[7]
McNicholas started his faculty career at University of Guelph in 2007. In 2014, he joined McMaster University. He has authored more than 100 scientific works cited over 4000 times.[8] The majority of his research has been on model-based clustering, specifically in developing novel finite mixture models for clustering and classification of multivariate data. He has published works on clustering high-dimensional data and the use of non-Gaussian mixtures.[9] McNicholas has published two monographs: Mixture Model-Based Classification[10] and Data Science with Julia.[11]
In 2017, he was inducted into the College of New Scholars Artists and Scientists of the college of the Royal Society of Canada.[12] [13] In 2019, he was awarded an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.[14]