Sofia Olhede – Research Interests

 

My fundamental research interest is modelling complex and heterogeneous phenomena observed in time or space. The tools to easily form models for such phenomena come from harmonic analysis and correspond to Fourier transforms, or local alternatives to such decompositions. Because very few signals appear identical when observed at multiple instances, I model structure as stochastic, and design methods to estimate such signal population structure.

 

Analysis of MRI data

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) allows us to measure the Fourier transform of a time/space domain signal. For diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging this corresponds to the Fourier transform of a probability density function (PDF) of spatial diffusion. I have been developing nonparametric methods to quantify the spatial structure of such a PDF. I also design inference methods for other signal modalities such as EEG data.

 

Publication:

Olhede, S. and Whitcher B., A statistical framework to characterise microstructure in high angular resolution diffusion imaging, Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, 2008. ISBI 2008. 5th IEEE International Symposium on 14-17 May 2008 Page(s):899 – 902.

 

Inference for Noisy Diffusions

Stochastic Differential Equations are used to model processes in Finance, Oceanography and a variety of other areas. Modern data acquisition protocols enable the high frequency sampling of such processes. Unfortunately most sampling procedures are not noise-free and so any analysis method must cope with additional noise structure. This can be a very hard problem to tackle in the time domain, as information across several different scales must be combined to get a good appreciation of the noise level. In the Fourier domain, the problem simplifies considerably and leads to simple and effective inference procedures.

 

Publication:

Olhede S. C.,  Sykulski A. and Pavliotis G. Multiscale Inference for High-Frequency Data, Department of Statistical Science Reseach Report 290. Version available at http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0392 To appear in SIAM MMS.

 

Analysis of Nonstationary Multiple Time series

Temporal phenomena are rarely observed in isolation, and often we wish to infer the joint properties of multiple phenomena. This is a very difficult problem, and standard notions of defining nonstationary multiple processes are less than perfectly elegant, requiring very strong assumptions on joint structure or smoothness. I have been developing flexible analysis methods for pairs of nonstationary signals observed in physical oceanography.

 

Publications:

Lilly J. and Olhede S. C. Higher Order Properties of Analytic Wavelet IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing , 57, Page(s):146 – 160.

Lilly J. and Olhede S. C. Bivariate Instantaneous Frequency and Bandwidth, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.4111 .

 

Analysis of phenomena in 2-D and 3-D

Spatial phenomena are distinct from temporal processes. For temporal processes, time has not just structure but also directionality: most phenomena should not operate identically under time-reversal. Spatial processes usually do not exhibit any natural ‘ordering’, and so are fundamentally different from temporal phenomena. Spatial phenomena are often local, and highly heterogeneous. I have been developing methods of characterising local heterogeneous spatial structure using triplets of wavelet functions.

 

Publications:

Metikas, G. and Olhede, S. C. Multiple Multidimensional Morse Wavelets. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 55, 921—936.

Olhede, S. C. Hyperanalytic Denoising. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 16, 1522—1537.

Olhede, S. C. Localisation of Geometric Anisotropy. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 56, 2133—2138.

Olhede S and Metikas G. The Monogenic Wavelet Transform, Appeared in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 57, Pages: 3426-3441 .