Timothy Chapman
Feature Extraction of Wheat Data from Genotypes and Peptide Sequences
The ARC Centre for Plant Energy Biology focuses on the energy efficiency of plants in harsh environments. One of their current projects is on proteins complex assembly in plants, and in particular on peptide and protein measurements arising from genotypes in grain. The data sets are on 13,000 peptide sequences, and the 67 genotypes in grain they arise from.
Variables in the smaller ‘quality’ data will be selected for the relation to ‘extendability’, which is essential in the production of quality pasta dough and bread, for example.
Finding the most relevant features from the main data will aid the biochemist in the development of methods which can enhance the variables related to these variables in future crops while retaining properties of plant proteins and peptides necessary for survival in a harsh environment.
The main data falls in the category of high-dimension low sample size data which does not follow the classical statistical rules. New approaches for such data have been developed over the last few decades and active statistical research is devoted to this area.
Timothy Chapman
University of Western Australia
Timothy Chapman is a student at UWA who has recently completed his second year in a Mathematics and Statistics major. At a young age, Timothy was attracted to programming and informatics, with a latent interest in mathematics that flourished in the last few years of school and developed into a passion. Timothy actively contributes to open source projects, and is currently vice-president of the University Computer Club.
While at UWA Timothy has enjoyed the major to such an extent that he has completed double the required number of maths units. So far he’s studied a variety of topics including
statistics, graph theory, and differential geometry. Timothy likes to combine his interests in mathematics and computer science. He sees great potential in fields that blend maths/stats and computer science with other disciplines, such as bio-informatics. It is with this in mind that Timothy has a second major—Molecular Biology.
Outside mathematics Timothy has a keen interest in typography and cooking (particularly pâtisserie).
