In many areas of research, such as within medical statistics, biology and geostatistics, problems arise requiring the analysis of angular (or directional) data. Many possess experimental design problems and require analysis of variance techniques for suitable analysis of the angular data. These techniques have been developed for very limited cases and the sensitivity of such techniques to the violation of assumptions made, and their possible extension to larger experimental models, has yet to be investigated. The general aim of this project is therefore to develop suitable experimental design models and analysis of variance type techniques for the analysis of directional data. Initially a generalised linear modelling approach is used to derive parameter estimates for one-way classification designs leading to maximum likelihood methods. This approach however, when applied to larger experimental designs is shown to be intractable due to optimization problems. The limited analysis of variance techniques presently available for angular data are reviewed and extended to take account of the possible addition of further factors within an experimental design. These are shown to breakdown under varying conditions and question basic underlying assumptions regarding the components within the original approach. A new analysis of variance approach is developed which possesses many desirable properties held in standard 'linear' statistical analysis of variance. Finally several data sets are analysed to support the validity of the new techniques.

The protein structure prediction problem consists of determining a protein’s three-dimensional structure from the underlying sequence of amino acids. A standard approach for predicting such structures is to conduct a stochastic search of conformation space in an attempt to find a conformation that optimizes a scoring function. For one subclass of prediction protocols, called template-based modeling, a new protein is suspected to be structurally similar to other proteins with known structure. The solved related proteins may be used to guide the search of protein structure space. There are many potential applications for statistics in this area, ranging from the development of structure scores to improving search algorithms. This dissertation focuses on strategies for improving structure predictions by incorporating information about closely related “template” protein structures into searches of protein conformation space. This is accomplished by generating density estimates on conformation space via various simplifications of structure models. By concentrating a search for good structure conformations in areas that are inhabited by similar proteins, we improve the efficiency of our search and increase the chances of finding a low-energy structure. In the course of addressing this structural biology problem, we present a number of advances to the field of Bayesian nonparametric density estimation. We first develop a method for density estimation with bivariate angular data that has applications to characterizing protein backbone conformation space. We then extend this model to account for multiple angle pairs, thereby addressing the problem of modeling protein regions instead of single sequence positions. In the course of this analysis we incorporate an informative prior into our nonparametric density estimate and find that this significantly improves performance for protein loop prediction. The final piece of our structure prediction strategy is to connect side-chain locations to our torsion angle representation of the protein backbone. We accomplish this by using a Bayesian nonparametric model for dependence that can link together two or more multivariate marginals distributions. In addition to its application for our angular-linear data distribution, this dependence model can serve as an alternative to nonparametric copula methods.

The thesis aims at designing and implementing a web application that will be used for the integration of web data sources. For data integration, a method using domain model of the target information system was applied. The work describes individual methods used for extracting information from web pages. The text describes the process of designing the architecture of the system including a description of the chosen technologies and tools. The main part of the work is implementation and testing the final web application that is written in Java and Angular framework. The outcome of the work is a web application that will allow its users to define web data sources and save data in the target database.