Meet Huan Lin – Statistics Summer Scholarship recipient

This summer, we have a number of fantastic students who received a Department of Statistics scholarship to work on fascinating projects with our staff members. We’ll be profiling them here on Stats Chat and we’d love to hear your feedback on their projects!

Huan Lin is working with Chris Triggs and Pat Riddle (Computer Science) on a research project entitled ‘How many clusters are there, really?’

Huan explains:

“Initially, I’m working with two data sets with known properties to compare and contrast distance metrics and clustering algorithms both directly and in presence of noise.

“After this I will work with data sets of mixtures of categorical, binary and continuous variables where there are no predefined clusters. Then, I will investigate clustering algorithms in R and Weka to compare and contrast results. I will be writing R functions to generate datasets with known properties that can be applied to a variety of scenarios.

“At the end of the project, I am expected to become a confident R programmer to write R functions effectively and efficiently.”

More about Huan:

“I am currently in my final year of a BA and BCom conjoint degree, majoring in statistics and accounting. I enjoy learning and exploring statistics because it is a useful tool for us to better understand the world we live in. In addition, statistics provides me with many practical skills that are transferable in a variety of fields, which would be my competitive edge in the workforce.

I also enjoy playful Zumba classes for their music and rhythm. Over the summer, I also plan to study a bit of philosophy and, of course, have some time off to spend with my family and friends.”