Hi, I’m Dan MacKinlay.

I’m a statistician and musician from Australia. Musician should be clear. Statistician, though, what’s that? A statistician is the exact same thing as a data scientist or machine learning researcher with the differences that there are qualifications needed to be a statistician, and that we are snarkier.

These days I work across data analysis, music, generative design and machine learning, especially for time series. I’ve been based at various times at such locations as

• Zürich, Switzerland, where I did my MSc in statistics under Professors Sara van de Geer and Didier Sornette at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
• Sydney, Australia, where I visualised data for the Powerhouse Museum under Seb Chan
• Bandung, Indonesia, where I worked on interactive music with Common Room and Gustaff Harriman Iskandar

Currently I am doing a PhD in statistics with Zdravko Botev at the University of New South Wales Sydney.

My current methods of interest are point process inference, compressive sensing, design grammars, sequential Monte Carlo methods, concatenative synthesis, differentiable learning, branching processes, Hilbert-space methods in high dimensional inference, stochastic differential equations and the application of all of these to economic modelling, reliability engineering and sick breakbeats.