Contact
I am now on leave from UCL and at University of Bologna, Italy
My website in Bologna
Department of Statistical Sciences "Paolo Fortunati",
University of Bologna,
via delle Belle Arti, 41
40126 - Bologna - Italy
Tel: +39 0512098163
email-address: christian.hennig (at) unibo.it, or still
c.hennig (at) ucl.ac.uk
Previous places of work
University of Hamburg, Faculty of Mathematics, Center of Mathematical Stochastics (student
1986-1989, 1991-1993, assistant and PhD student/Doktorand
1993-1997, assistant, postdoc 1997-2001, 2003-2005)
ETH Zürich,
Faculty of Mathematics, Seminar for
Statistics (assistant, postdoc 2001-2003)
University of Dortmund, Faculty of Statistics
(student 1989-1991)
Bochumer Arbeitsgruppe
für Sozialen Konstruktivismus und Wirklichkeitsprüfung
(not really a place of work, but I had the honor to contribute some papers and
ideas to this wonderful website - German language only, sorry!)
Research
Areas of interest: multivariate analysis (especially clustering and
classification); robust statistics; model selection; simulation and bootstrap;
explorative and graphical data analysis; philosophical background
of statistics, probability and data analysis; didactics.
Current projects:
- A constructivist philosophy of statistics and data analysis
- Research-aim driven estimation of the number of clusters
- Robust mixture clustering
- Clustering mixed type nominal/ordinal/interval data
- Subjective decisions in statistics; design of loss functions
and dissimilarity measures
- Principles for cluster benchmarking and comparing clustering methods
- Various collaborations in applied data analysis in musicology
(similarity of melodies), systematic biology (species delimitation),
sociology (social stratification), web design, archaeology.
PhD projects
I supervise PhD projects particularly in the areas of cluster analysis,
classification,
philosophy of statistics, robust statistical inference, and multivariate data
analysis. I do not normally have
personal funding available but there are a number of possibilities to get a
PhD project funded (although most of them are very competitive).
Please note that currently the demand for supervision
is very high and I may only accept new
students under exceptional circumstances.
Current PhD students
- Serhat Akhanli: Analysis of football player performance data
- Iqbal Shamsudheen: The performance of statistical
inference after model checking
- Fatima Batool: Estimation of the number of clusters (details tbc)
Former PhD students
- Pietro Coretto: The noise component in model-based clustering
- Elisabet Lund: Evidence-based crime investigation: a Bayesian approach
- Laura Anderlucci (formally PhD-student of University of Bologna):
Comparing Different Approaches for
Clustering Categorical Data
- Daniel Meddings: Statistical inference in mixture models with
random effects
- Chien Ju Lin: A pattern-clustering method for longitudinal data -
heroin users receiving methadone
Societies:
Journals:
I'm Associate Editor of Advances in Data Analysis and Classification, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Statistics and Computing, Statistical Methods and Applications.
Software
My add-on packages fpc (flexible procedures
for clustering), prabclus (clustering presence-absence data), smoothmest
(smoothing M-estimators for 1-d location) and trimkmeans (trimmed k-means)
for the R-statistical software are available from R home/CRAN, as well as quantileDA for the quantile classifier by Cinzia Viroli, on which I collaborated.
Papers and publications.
Teaching
2015/2016 term 2: STATG018/3005/M018 Factorial Experimentation.
2015/2016 term 2: STATG019/3019/M019 Selected Topics in Statistics (part I Cluster Analysis).