Official Statistics - European Master of Official Statistics - EMOS

(Carsten Jentsch)

The task of European official statistics is to depict the social and economic life of all EU member states in figures. Questions include: Who is poor, who is rich, how do prices and wealth change, what goods flow where. A course of study with a focus on EMOS is therefore ideal for anyone who is interested in statistics in the original sense of "state studies" and wants to know what it really looks like "out there".

In addition to pure data collection, however, there are also methodological problems, such as how to substitute missing values or how to extract seasonal effects from time series: What part of the December sales increase is due to Christmas sales, and what part is attributable to "real" growth? Knowledge of national accounts is also key: How to calculate national product and its components of consumption and investment, savings, imports, exports, and so on.

There are excellent career prospects in official statistics, which employs several thousand graduates across Europe, with over 100 job openings each year.

Biometrics

(Katja Ickstadt, Jörg Rahnenführer, Kirsten Schorning, Roland Fried, Philipp Doebler, Andreas Groll)

Biostatistics deals with a wide range of questions in medical research. In addition to classical questions in clinical statistics and epidemiology, it also deals with many other medically relevant topics in the life sciences, toxicology and ecology.

In Clinical Statistics, the effect of clinical variables on the diagnosis and therapy of human diseases is investigated. Clinical studies with clearly defined statistical evaluation methods are a prerequisite for the approval of all prescription drugs in most countries.

In epidemiology, the influence of various possible influencing factors on disease and health in individuals and in populations is studied. Epidemiology therefore plays a central role in health promotion. Research on genetic issues is particularly intense worldwide; for example, Personalized Medicine and Genetic Epidemiology address the role of genetic factors in clinical statistics and epidemiology. In recent years, many new experimental techniques have been developed for the analysis of genomic data, in which myriad traits are measured simultaneously, making the skilled use of Big Data analyses enormously important.

Many students in the Department of Statistics go on to work in key positions in the development and application of biostatistical methods after graduation, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, contract research organizations, the health care sector, and universities and research institutes.

For more information on biometric research, click here.

Econometrics / Empirical Economic Research

(Carsten Jentsch, Matei Demetrescu, Philipp Doebler)

Econometrics is the science of quantitative - i.e. statistical - analysis of economic relationships. This includes, for example, macroeconomic(etr)ic issues such as modeling and forecasting economic growth, consumption, or unemployment. In microeconomic(etr)istic analyses, the market power of firms, the educational choices of young people, or the forecasting of sales volumes, among others, are of great interest. In the last 20 to 30 years, financial econometrics has also developed as an independent field. This involves modeling and forecasting the prices of securities of all kinds.

Econometrics also has a broad methodological base, with the most important tool being regression analysis. Due to the temporal structure of much economic data, diverse methods of time series analysis, which are often developed specifically for econometric problems, are also of great importance.

Exciting careers in banks, insurance companies, management consultancies, large industrial and commercial enterprises, or economic research institutes await graduates of this major. Last but not least, 17 of the 77 Nobel Prize winners in economics were econometricians.

Technometrics

(Christine Müller, Roland Fried, Andreas Groll)

Technometrics is concerned with the development and use of statistical methods in physical, chemical, and engineering sciences as well as in information sciences and information technology. This includes developments at the interface of statistics and computer science such as data mining, machine learning, and the handling of large data sets.

On the one hand, the central statistical tools are quality assurance methods such as control charts, measurement system analysis, reliability analysis, and statistical design of experiments, as well as statistical modeling and simulation of technical processes. In particular, this involves the development and use of models for fault detection, fault analysis and improvement in technical processes and products.

On the other hand, technometrics develops tools for the analysis of large amounts of data. These include special classification and regression methods that can handle large amounts of data, as well as mathematical-statistical methods for estimating the behavior of these methods with ever larger amounts of data. This field of so-called "big data analytics" has become an integral part of current science.