Barbara Ikica

Barbara Ikica

PhD Mathematician trained in evolutionary game theory and complex networks with a passion for data science, machine learning, and problem solving.

About me

My research interests and activities focus on investigating complex systems as they unfold through time and space using mathematical modelling, data science, and machine learning (projects). I am particularly enthusiastic about wrangling real-world data.

Methods

At the core of any such system lie evolution, its driving force of change, and a graph, encoding its structure. To examine how the former affects the latter, and vice versa, I resort to

  • evolutionary game theory, population dynamics, and graph theory;
  • Bayesian inference, econometric and statistical analysis of data;
  • agent-based modelling, computer simulations, programming.

While I am best skilled in these areas, I also have a strong interest in machine learning and (deep) reinforcement learning.

Coding

I mostly work in Python and am proficient in, for example:

  • Pandas, NumPy, h5py, Scipy, Scikit-learn, and Statsmodels for statistical data analysis,
  • Matplotlib and Seaborn for visualisation (in combination with the LaTeX drawing package PGF/TikZ),
  • Igraph for network analysis,
  • PyStan for Bayesian inference, rpy2 for embedding R methods,
  • C-extension Cython for boosting performance,
  • GeoPy and Folium for geospatial analysis.

I have also gained experience in Bash, C++, Matlab, Mathematica, SQL, C#, R, HTML & CSS.