South African Statistical Association

Postgraduate Awards

Postgraduate Paper 2025

Published paper

First Prize

A contaminated regression model for count health data.

Arno Otto (UP), supervised by Prof Johan Ferreira,

with co-authors Dr Daniele Tomarchio, Prof Andriette Bekker and Prof Antonio Punzo

Second Prize

Modelling toroidal data for representation and analysis of protein dihedral angles.

Claudio Jardim, supervised by Dr Najmeh Nakhaeirad

with co-author Prof Inger Fabris-Rotelli

International Journal of Modelling and Simulation

Unpublished papers

First Prize

Clustering data with values missing at random using scale mixtures of multivariate skew-normal distributions.

Jason Pillay (UP), supervised by Prof Andriette Bekker,

with co-authors Prof Cristina Tortora and Prof Antonio Punzo

Second Prize

Mixtures of multivariate linear asymmetric Laplace regressions with multiple asymmetric Laplace covariates.

Arno Otto (UP), supervised by Prof Johan Ferreira,

with co-authors Prof Andriette Bekker, Prof Antonio Punzo, and Prof Cristina Tortora

Third Prize

A circular interval-valued time series model.

Thasmika Mohan (UP), supervised by Dr Najmeh Nakhaeirad

with co-author Dr Sphiwe Skhosana

Honours Project 2025

First Prize

“A Critical Analysis of History Matching and Emulation”

Ms Sian Wood and Ms Molly Ryan (UCT) – Group Project

(R7 500.00)

Second Prize

“Comparing Statistical Imputation Methods to XGBOOST’s Internal Handling of Missing Data”

Mr Musawenkosi Mthembu (WITS) – Individual Project

(R5 500.00)

Third Prize

“Classification models determining queen bee status among hives using audio data”

Mr Merwe Engelbrecht and Mr Christopher Paul (SU) – Group Project

(R4 000.00)

Third Prize

“Temporal surveillance of antimicrobial resistance using minimum inhibitory concentration values: A Bayesian framework”

Ms Jeanette Louw (UP) – Individual Project

(R3 500.00)

Young Statisticians

Posters at SASA 2025

First Prize: Odey Redi Mofokeng, with project title: “Refining wastewater surveillance through regression Kriging: A geostatistical approach to improve spatial prediction and public health applications” (Wits)

Second Prize: Molly Ryan and Sian Wood, with project title: “A calibration conundrum: our critical analysis of history matching and emulation with hmer” (UCT)

Oral presentations at SASA 2025

First Prize: Tshemollo Bokamoso Rapolai, with presentation title: “Modelling cryptocurrency markets using the Laplace scale mixture distributions” (UCT)

Second Prize: Marius Alberts, with presentation title: “Applying goal programming to optimise cricket team selection for the Indian Premier League” (NWU)

Third Prize: Tyriq Emmanuel Pillay, with presentation title: “Performance of static and dynamic occupancy models” (UCT)

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