MSc Statistics and Operational Research

University of Essex

Our MSc Statistics and Operational Research will appeal if your first degree included mathematics as its major subject. We expect you to have prior knowledge of statistics – for example significance testing or basic statistical distributions – and operational research such as linear programming.

Businesses, organisations, and individuals all strive to work as effectively as possible. Operational research uses advanced statistical and analytical methods to help improve the complex decision-making processes to deliver a product or service. Working in this field, you might be identifying future needs for a business, evaluating the time-life value of a customer, or carrying out computer simulations for airlines.

You specialise in areas including:

• Continuous and discrete optimisation
• Time series econometrics
• Heuristic computation
• Experimental design
• Machine learning
• Linear models

Our interdisciplinary research recognises that mathematics, including what can be very abstract mathematics, is an essential part of research in many other disciplines.

Our Department of Mathematical Sciences has an international reputation in many areas including semi-group theory, optimisation, probability, applied statistics, bioinformatics, and mathematical biology.

Your future

Our MSc Statistics and Operational Research will equip you with employability skills like problem solving, analytical reasoning, data analysis, and mathematical modelling, as well as training you in independent work, presentation and writing skills.

Your exposure to current active research areas, such as decomposition algorithms, prepares you for further study at doctoral level. Graduates of this course now hold key positions in government, business and academia, and work for global companies such as Ocado Technology and Dunnhumby, as well as for HM Revenue & Customs, as data and business intelligence analysts.

We also offer supervision for PhD, MPhil, and MSc by Dissertation. We have an international reputation in many areas such as semi-group theory, optimisation, probability, applied statistics, bioinformatics and mathematical biology, and our staff are strongly committed to research and to the promotion of graduate activities.