Press release

25th September 2023

Irish research paper among top five most influential mathematics papers over the past decade

Paper from the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics is among five most cited according to leading Web of Science database.

An Irish research paper is the fourth most cited paper in mathematics in the last ten years.

The paper written by an international team including Professor Brendan Murphy of the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics at UCD, Dr Michael Fop (UCD), Luca Scrucca (Perugia) and Prof. Adrian Raftery (U Washington), ranks fourth out of 515,477 papers on the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) database, the world’s leading scientific citation search and analytical information platform.

Published in 2016, the paper, entitled mclust 5: Clustering, Classification and Density Estimation Using Gaussian Finite Mixture Models describes mclust, a widely used software that provides tools for doing model-based clustering. Remarkably, the associated software has been downloaded 6.7 million times in the last five years, which is about twice a minute.

Clustering is the grouping of objects based on their attributes and it can be argued that it as old as language itself. Model-based clustering is an approach to clustering that uses statistical modelling. It has applications in areas such as biology, medicine and the social sciences.

Professor Brendan Murphy said, “The number of citations is due to how popular the mclust software is globally. It is gratifying to see the impact it has had globally.”

A book giving a comprehensive overview of the mclust software has recently been published by CRC Press.

Ends

The Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics

The Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics is one of Europe’s largest data analytics research organisations, with over 450 researchers, more than 80 industry partners and €150+ million in funding. Its research spans Fundamentals of Data Science, Sensing and Actuation, Scaling Algorithms, Model Building, Multi-Modal Analysis, Data Engineering and Governance, Decision Making, and Trustworthy AI.

Insight is made up of four host institutions at DCU, University of Galway, UCC and UCD. Insight’s partner sites are Maynooth University, Tyndall, TCD and UL.