YAP Von Bing's Homepage

Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, National University of Singapore
S16 06-105, 6 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117546
Tel: (65) 6516 7143 Fax: (65) 6872 3919 email: stayapvb{at}nus.edu.sg

My surname (family or last name), is Yap. My given (first) name is Von Bing. I have no middle name.

Teaching

Stripped to its bare essentials, teaching is show-and-tell, which looks easier than it is. The general technique is brilliantly developed in Statistics 4e by Freedman, Pisani and Purves (Norton), ideal for an introductory undergraduate course. The Analysis of Variance by Scheffé (Wiley) is great for a course on linear models. I plan to build a graduate applied statistics course on Statistical Models by Freedman (Cambridge University Press).

Courses

2004/05 Semesters 1,2 MDG5108 Biostatistics for Basic Research
05/06 S1 ST4233 Linear Models
05/06 S2 ST2132 Mathematical Statistics
06/07 S1 ST4233 Linear Models
06/07 S2, 07/08 S1,S2, 08/09 S1 ST1232 Statistics for Life Sciences
09/10 S1 ST2137 Computer Aided Data Analysis

Articles

1. The standard deviation as a descriptive statistics. Singapore Mathematical Medley, 34 (2007).
2. An elementary proof that row rank equals column rank. Singapore Mathematical Medley, 35 (2008).

Supervision (past and current)

2 PhD, 1 MSc, 7 Honours students (2 shared), 2 Computational Biology Honours students, 2 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme students, and one project group of the Special Programme in Science.

Teaching tool

A visualisation of the Strong Law of Large Numbers for the uniform distribution on {0,1,2}.

Research

Markov chains, molecular evolution, computational genomics. In general applied statistics in biology.

1. Matrix extension and biorthogonal multiwavelet construction (with SS Goh). Linear Algebra and its Applications, 269:139--157 (1998).
2. Association between divergence and interspersed repeats in mammalian noncoding genomic DNA (with F Chiaromonte, S Yang, L Elnitski, W Miller and RC Hardison). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 98:14503--14508 (2001).
3. Scoring pairwise genomic sequence alignments (with F Chiaromonte and W Miller). Proceedings of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, 115--126 (2002).
4. Modeling genomic DNA base substitution (with TP Speed). Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, 3855--3864 (2002).
5. Modeling DNA base substitution in large genomic regions from two organisms (with TP Speed). Journal of Molecular Evolution, 58:12--18 (2004).
6. Identification of evolutionary hotspots in the rodent genomes (with L Pachter). Genome Research, 14:574--579 (2004).
7. Genome sequence of the brown Norway rat yields insights into mammalian evolution (with The Rat Genome Sequencing Consortium). Nature, 428:493--521 (2004).
8. Comparative immunopeptidomics of humans and their pathogens (with S Istrail, L Florea, BV Halldorsson, O Kohlbacher, RS Schwartz, JW Yewdell and SL Hoffman). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 101:13268--13272 (2004).
9. Rooting a phylogenetic tree with nonreversible substitution models (with TP Speed). BMC Evolutionary Biology, 5:2 (2005).
10. Estimating substitution matrices (with TP Speed). In Statistical Methods in Molecular Evolution, edited by R Nielsen (2005).
11. The defensive role of scutes in juvenile fluted giant clams (Tridacna squamosa) (with L Han, PT Todd, LM Chou and B Sivaloganathan). Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology, 359:77--83 (2008).
12. Comparison of methods for estimating the nucleotide substitution matrix (with M Oscamou, D McDonald, GA Huttley, ME Lladser and R Knight). BMC Bioinformatics, 9:511 (2008).
13. Pathological rate matrices: from primates to pathogens (with HW Schranz, S Easteal, R Knight and GA Huttley). BMC Bioinformatics, 9:550 (2008).
14. Pitfalls of the most commonly used models of context dependent substitution (with H Lindsay and GA Huttley). Biology Direct, 3:52 (2008).
15. Data-driven optimization of metabolomics methods using rat liver samples (with GS Parab, P Rao, S Lakshminarayanan, SM Moochhala and S Swarup). Analytical Chemistry, 81:1315--1323 (2009).
16. Similar states in continuous-time Markov chains. Journal of Applied Probability, 46:497--506 (2009).
17. Estimates of the effect of natural selection on protein coding content (with H Lindsay, S Easteal and G Huttley). Molecular Biology and Evolution, Online Advance Access (2009).
18. Statistical analysis of binary data generated from multilocus dominant DNA markers (with TF Khang). Accepted by Molecular Ecology Resources.
19. The apportionment of total genetic variation by categorical analysis of variance (with TF Khang). Accepted by Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology.

Service

Local places/meetings I have gone to talk statistics to teachers and students:

1. National University of Singapore: Department of Anatomy, Open House, Science Research Programme, Centre for Development of Teaching and Learning, Science Faculty Teaching Workshop, Science Focus, Statistics Camp.
2. Schools: Hwa Chong Institution, Raffles Junior College, Victoria Junior College.
3. Ministry of Education: Gifted Education Programme Annual Conference 2004, 'A' Level Mathematics Teachers Sharing Session 2009.
4. Singapore Mathematics Society: Mathematics Enrichment Programme, Primary Mathematics Olympiad Programme.

I supervised three projects under the Science Mentorship Programme for secondary schools.