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Mark Webster

Data Scientist

Visformatics

About

Former Statistics postgraduate at University of Leeds (UK), now a Data Scientist at Visformatics. My current work is under wraps, but I aim to make this site a portfolio for older work and side projects. It’s currently under construction. I’m planning to migrate over my posts on my old blog. In the meantime, you can see them at the old Probability and Statistics blog, The Accidental Statistician.

Former posts:

  • Research Associate in Modelling, working in the department of Health Economics and Decision Modelling at the University of Sheffield.
  • Postdoctoral research fellow in Statistics,working on statistical modelling and calibration at the University of Leeds.
  • Postgraduate research student in Statistics, working on Monte Carlo Methods, at the University of Leeds.

Postdoc supervisor: John Paul Gosling

PhD supervisors: Jochen Voss, Stuart Barber.

Interests

  • Probability and Statistics
  • Statistical Modelling

Education

  • PhD in Monte Carlo Methods (Statistics), 2017

    University of Leeds

  • MMath in Mathematics, 2011

    University of Leeds

Recent Posts

Adding "views" to autodb, part three: summarising the schema

Last time, we wrote a function to check whether a given database schema is connected – ignoring relations for constants, as a special …
Last updated on 3 December 2025

Adding "views" to autodb, part two: initial tests

Last time, I showed how I think that adding “views” – i.e. previous decomposition steps, or “pre-decompositions” – to a database schema …
Last updated on 9 November 2025

Adding "views" to autodb, part one: motivation

autodb is still chugging along. Most of the additions I’ve made recently have been stuff that’s nice to have around the edges. Add a …
Last updated on 30 October 2025

Manchester R user group slides

I gave a short talk on the autodb package to the Manchester R user group a few days ago. The slides are now available here, or from the …
Last updated on 5 July 2025

autodb is on CRAN

I’m pleased to announce that autodb is now on CRAN, in addition to Github. I haven’t submitted anything to CRAN before, so I’m really …
Last updated on 5 July 2025
See all posts

Projects

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All Side projects Work projects

autodb

Automatic database normalisation for R data frames.

Codex

Statistical modelling of a card game’s forum tournament data.

Thesis

Convergence properties of Approximate Bayesian computation

Publications

Sophie Whyte, Chloe Thomas, Ben Kearns, Mark Webster
22 September 2017 University of Sheffield, ScHaRR HEDS discussion papers

Optimising Bowel Cancer Screening Phase 1: Optimising the cost effectiveness of repeated FIT screening and screening strategies combining bowel scope and FIT screening

Evaluating the cost-effectiveness of bowel cancer screening programmes in the UK.

White Rose Research Online Version
Mark Webster
31 July 2016 University of Leeds / White Rose eTheses Online repository

Convergence properties of approximate Bayesian computation

We also introduce a new variant of ABC.

Project White Rose eTheses Online version
Stuart Barber, Jochen Voss, Mark Webster
6 February 2015 Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 9, Number 1

The rate of convergence for approximate Bayesian computation

Our results can be used to guide the choice of the tolerance parameter.

Project DOI ArXiv pre-print Journal version
Robert M. Heath, Michael G. Tanner, Alessandro Casaburi, Mark Webster, Lara San Emeterio Alvarez, Weitao Jiang, Zoe H. Barber, Richard J. Warburton, Robert H. Hadfield
10 February 2014 Applied Physics Letters, Volume 104, Issue 6

Nano-optical observation of cascade switching in a parallel superconducting nanowire single photon detector

We explicitly demonstrate the single- and multi-photon triggering regimes.

DOI ArXiv pre-print Journal version

Topics

Adding "views" to autodb Approximate Bayesian computation autodb Codex Data structures Health Economics Programming Property-based testing Python R Relational model Rust Scoring rules Side project Slides Talks Work project