An interdisciplinary program that draws faculty members from five faculties and schools across the McMaster campus and the Canada Centre for Inland Waters offers students the opportunity to specialize in:
- Medical Statistics (biostatistics)
- Applied Statistics
- Statistical Theory
- Applied Probability
Admission
B.A. or B.Sc. honours degree, B+ standing, or equivalent, with a good background in statistics and mathematics. Students with a degree in engineering, science, health sciences, or social sciences will enthusiastically be considered, provided they have a B+ average with sufficient mathematics and statistics background. Students coming from other areas may be required to take additional undergraduate courses to make up any deficiencies.
Students can earn the M.Sc. degree following one of the options below. In both options students can take up to two 600-level courses to fulfill their graduate course requirements. All Master statistics students entering the program are required to take the zero credit statistics seminar course STATS 770. In addition, the following requirements apply to students in different options
Thesis Option
Students choosing the Thesis Option are required to complete six one-semester graduate courses (consisting of three compulsory and three elective courses) and a thesis. Equivalent in work to two one-semester courses, the thesis is written under the supervision of a faculty member of the program in a topic of mutual interest to student and supervisor. The degree requirements are normally completed in four academic terms.
Coursework Option
The Coursework Option requires completion of eight one-term graduate courses (consisting of four compulsory and four elective courses). The degree requirements are normally completed in two or three academic terms.
Required Courses
In the Statistics Program, there are required, elective, and special topics courses. Required courses cover the basic theoretical concepts that are considered essential for all students. Another required course develops a broad knowledge of statistics through attendance at research seminars as well as report-writing skills through critical written reviews of the seminars. The elective courses are traditional statistics courses covering a sufficient variety of topics to offer students a choice based upon their individual interests. Approved courses from other graduate programs may be taken as elective courses for graduate credit.
- STATS 743 / Foundations of Statistics (two one-term courses)
- STATS 752 / Linear Models and Experimental Designs (one one-term course)
- STATS 770 / Statistics Seminar
- STATS 771 / Statistical Research Project (required for course work option)
Medical Statistics
Students concentrating in Medical Statistics will be required to take courses in Health Research Methodology, such as:
- HTH RS M 721 / Fundamentals of Health Research and Evaluation Methods
- HTH RS M 730 / Introduction to Research Methods for Randomized Controlled Trials
Additional Information
Some Medical Sciences courses have prerequisites and limited enrolment, so students should contact the Health Research Methodology Program office at ext. 27718 before registering. Special topics courses are intended to be highly flexible and vary from year to year. They are usually offered in the areas of specialization of individual faculty members.
Graduate/Undergraduate Courses
Graduate students taking the following combined graduate/undergraduate courses for graduate credit will be required to do more work than undergraduates in the same class. The additional work may include a project, an essay, a class presentation, or a more difficult examination, at the discretion of the instructor. For the M.Sc. in Statistics, at most two 600-level courses may be taken for graduate credit. The following 600-level courses are available for the Statistics Program.
- STATS 6A03 / Time Series
- STATS 6C03 / Generalized Linear Models
- STATS 6CI3 / Computational Methods for Inference
- STATS 6D03 / Intermediate Probability Theory
- STATS 6I03 / Inference
- STATS 6M03 / Multivariate Analysis
- STATS 6P03 / Advanced Applied Statistics
Our teaching faculty is drawn from the departments of:
- Mathematics and Statistics
- Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics
- Sociology
- Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Economics
A variety of elective courses is available to cater to individual interests. A major area of specialization is health and medical statistics, with theses supervised by biostatisticians from the Health Sciences Centre who are faculty members in the program. Through courses and thesis work students learn about modern methodologies and do research on current health problems. Students interested in a broader area of applied or theoretical statistics may obtain training in one or more of the following areas: environmetrics, time series analysis, stochastic models in biology, statistical methods in genetics, economics, nonlinear models, applied statistics, order statistics, reliability, analysis of censored data, the booststrap and other resampling methods, nonparametric methods, comparative inference, and quality control. Our Research Data Centre, a Statistics Canada unit at McMaster, holds large real-life data sets from longitudinal surveys that are suitable for statistical analyses for theses and other research projects. Students interested in business or industrial applications may arrange to do their thesis work off-campus. Those interested in combining statistics with financial mathematics can take courses offered by the PhiMac Group at McMaster.
Our graduates have enjoyed a remarkable success rate in finding jobs and have gone to work for Statistics Canada, Health Canada, Canadian Institute for Health Information, industry, hospital research labs, polling companies, Revenue Canada, pharmaceutical companies, banks, marketing research, among others. Others have gone to pursue Ph.D. studies and become successful researchers. We offer a Ph.D. Statistics Specialization within our Ph.D. Program in Mathematics.
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics is housed in the James Stewart Centre for Mathematics at Hamilton Hall. An award winning renovation project made this historic building the finest facilities of any Statistics Program in Canada.