I am currently working with David Bryant at Otago University on testing lack-of-fit of a model in phylogenetics.

It’s great to be able to use my research experience in estimating overdispersion on an important scientific problem. One of the key aspects of the problem is the sparseness in the data, which are multinomial with a very large number of categories.

Joint work with Farzana Afroz and Matt Parry will be particularly useful in this setting, as we were able to derive an estimate of overdispersion that works really well for sparse multinomial data: the paper we published can be found here.

It’s been great to have these two papers come out in the last couple of weeks:

Model-averaged confidence distributions: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10651-019-00432-5

Estimating overdispersion in sparse multinomial data:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/biom.13194