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Using statistical research in the real world

“No discipline is at the sharp end of consultancy as much as statistics – every organisation has data they need to analyse”

The low opinion of statistics held by the general population is something that Professor David Hand is passionate about challenging. Professor Hand is the Head of the Statistics section at Imperial College London. He is also the President of the Royal Statistical Society, and regularly works as a consultant through Imperial Consultants.

His consultancy work sees him giving statistics advice to diverse industries - from hedge funds to pharmaceuticals, advertising to government.

“Working as a consultant in statistics is very exciting. It provides me and my research group with new challenges and problems and lets us test our theories. One day I can be working on cocaine contamination on bank notes, the next on whether an advertising campaign worked, and the next on the best class of statistical methods to use when analysing pharmaceutical data.”

Data in the real world

Models developed in an academic environment are tested in industry and then often adopted by banks, retail companies, and manufacturing and service organisations. And through consultancy the benefits flow the other way too. When Professor Hand worked as a key expert witness in a lawsuit involving US banks, he had the opportunity to study the models the banks were using in detail. Some of these were found to be based on a theoretical premise that had never been completely evaluated, and Hand discovered that some of the models were wrong.

“The relationship between consultancy and research is much stronger than other, more traditional relationships in academia such as the one between teaching and research” explains Hand. “Consultancy work often leads on to academic papers and research funding for the group.”

Pharmaceutical companies are another source of large, real-world data sets. The amount of information generated by drug development, testing and trials is enormous.

One of the pharmaceutical projects Professor Hand worked on was looking at the data from a production process. The company in question suspected a rival of copying their patented process and called in Hand to study the trace impurities of the end products and compare them. He was then able to assess the probability that they were coming from the same production process.

Hand encourages his younger research colleagues to take on consultancy work too. “Consultancy comes in all shapes and sizes – it can fit around your research and enhance it. Build yourself a reputation and take all the opportunities you can.”