Tony O'Hagan - Consulting

Consultancy home page

Welcome to my consultancy pages.

From 1st October 2012, I have fully retired from my academic job at the University of Sheffield. I have always been active in consultancy, and retirement allows me to spend a little more time on consulting work. I am a Chartered Statistician, which is a professional qualification administered by the Royal Statistical Society that recognises my skills as a practising statistician.

My expertise lies in the methodology and applications of Bayesian statistics.

Current projects include: assessment of safety mechanisms in nuclear reactors; elicitation of expert knowledge for food safety risk assessment; job profiling for recruitment; analysis of supermarket sales data.

As these examples illustrate, I work for a variety of clients across a very wide range of application areas - wherever Bayesian statistical methods can yield material benefits over more traditional approaches. I always enjoy new challenges.

Here are some topics in which I have particular expertise as a consultant.

• Elicitation. Eliciting expert knowledge about uncertain quantities, as a primary input to decision making.
• Asset management planning. Estimation of investment need based on combining limited sample data with expert knowledge.
• Health economics. Cost-effectiveness analysis, probabilistic sensitivity analysis, elicitation of expert beliefs, estimation of health-related utility measures.
• Design of drug development programmes. Bayesian design of individual trials, Bayesian clinical trial simulation, modelling and elicitation of expert knowledge, decision-support for drug development.
• Uncertainty in mechanistic models. Quantifying uncertainty in the predictions of models, calibration and data assimilation.
• Auditing. Bayesian methods to reduce audit sample sizes through incorporating non-sample information.

In all of the above topics, and many others, my methods are backed by numerous peer-reviewed articles in major journals. If you would like information about these, please contact me or browse my academic pages, using the buttons below. I do not simply apply off-the-shelf methods. Every consulting job is a challenge and many have led to the development of new methods that have been published and become the state of the art. I do not treat any of these ideas as intellectual property, but always seek to disseminate them through published articles. As a consultant, I offer not just standard methods, not just innovative methods that I have developed myself, but my skills in tackling each new problem on its own merits, in order to solve it as completely and appropriately as possible.