Mike Titterington | |
|---|---|
| Born | Donald Michael Titterington 1945 |
| Died | 2023[2] |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh University of Cambridge |
| Awards | Guy Medal (Silver) (2006) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Statistics |
| Institutions | University of Glasgow |
| Thesis | The Adaptive Optimisation of Yield (1972) |
| Doctoral advisor | Peter Whittle[1] |
Mike Titterington (1945–2023) was a Scottish statistician known for the breadth of his work. Perhaps best known for his work onmixture models[3] andneural networks,[4] he also published inoptimal design,smoothing techniques,image analysis,spatial statistics andhidden Markov models.[2]
Titterington was educated at theHigh School of Stirling before going on to the University of Edinburgh (obtaining afirst class degree) then a Diploma in Mathematical Statistics (with distinction) from the University of Cambridge.[5] Under Peter Whittle at Cambridge he continued to study for a PhD on stochastic nonlinear control.[1]
Post-PhD, Titterington spent his entire career working at the Department of Statistics at the University of Glasgow: first research assistant, then lecturer. He was appointed as a professor in 1982 and chair of statistics in 1988 before retiring in 2011.[6] During this time he was editor of several statistics journals, including theJournal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (1986–89) andBiometrika (1996–2007).[7] He edited (withDavid Cox) "Biometrika: One Hundred Years", collecting notable papers from the journal.[8] He also was involved in theRoyal Statistical Society (roles including honorary secretary and chair of the research section and vice president).
The Guy Medal in Silver was awarded to Titterington in 2006 for his 1981 paper[9] on discrimination methods and "for his important contributions to many areas of statistics, including the analysis of mixtures, incomplete data, latent structure analysis, neural networks, pattern recognition and machine learning, statistical smoothing, medical statistics and the design of experiments."[10]
He was a good friend ofPeter Hall, for whom he wrote an obituary in the Royal Statistical Society andAmerican Statistical Association magazineSignificance.[11] The pair authored 21 papers together.[12]
Titterington died in April 2023 after having been affected for many years byParkinson's disease.[6]
