Richard Vale

I am currently working as a Data Scientist. In 2014 I was a Lecturer in the Statistics Department at the University of Canterbury. I have a PhD in mathematics from the University of Glasgow (2007) and was an HC Wang Assistant Professor at Cornell University (2007-10). Previously I studied at the University of Auckland and the University of Cambridge (Part III Mathematics, aka M.A.St 2003). I have also taught at Oberlin College (2010-11), the University of Auckland, and AUT.

Contact details

Email: rtrvale at gmail etc.

Projects

I wrote a paper Forecasting the 2022-2023 Tech Layoffs using Epidemiological Models
I published a joint paper The Construction of G - Invariant Finite Tight Frames in Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications October 2016, Volume 22, Issue 5, pp 1097—1120.
  • Link to submitted version of the paper.
I wrote a paper A Model for Tax Evasion with some Realistic Properties. I gave a talk on this paper at the Massey University Applied Mathematics Seminar in Palmerston North on April 30 2015.
I attended the joint NZSA/ORSNZ conference in November 2014 and presented a discussion of a network imputation problem at the CMSS summer worskop on December 9-10 2014.
In September-October 2014, I worked on Bayesian modelling of Game of Thrones and some results, including a paper and code, can be found here. Here is a link to the paper (pdf) which contains spoilers for all five of the books (if you haven't read them, click with caution.)
In 2013-14 I worked with Rachel Fewster on capture-recpature models with applications to whales.
  • Vale, R.T.R., Fewster, R.M., Carroll, E.L., and Patenaude, N.J. Maximum likelihood inference for model Mt,a for capture-recapture data with misidentification. Biometrics, 2014. Full text (PDF) and Web Appendix.
  • Slides (pdf) from a talk at CREEM, St. Andrews, July 2014.
  • Slides (pdf) from a short version of the same talk.
In Febraury 2014 I gave a seminar at The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment on copula methods and interactive statistical graphics using Javascript and Canvas.
  • Tutorial on making an animated time series in html. Aimed at those with R experience.
  • Paper from the 2013 NZSA/ORSNZ conference.
I created an R package for making pretty data visualisations. Here is a user guide with examples.
I made a cyrillic keyboard for doing Russian homework using my preferred method of transcription. It only works in Chrome and Firefox, and not on mobile, but I am still finding it useful
Recently I made an experimental word cloud from the text of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Words which occur close together in the text should occur close together in the cloud. Conventional word clouds are just a way of showing how many times each word appears, so this is an interesting alternative.
In 2012 I wrote a Javascript app which plays the 17th century card game Put. For more information about the game, see the Put page at pagat.com.
From 2003 - '05, The Inspector Bloodhound Pages is a collection of puzzles which used to be on my website at Glasgow University.

Lecture Notes and Teaching Materials

All files are pdf.