A team of postgraduate students from the University of Macau (UM) Faculty of Science and Technology won a second prize at the 13th National Postgraduate Mathematic Contest in Modelling. The contest attracted nearly 9,000 teams from universities in China.

The UM team was formed by PhD student Guo Li and master’s students Wu Yinwen and Kong Lingning. Led by Assistant Professor Chen Long from the Department of Computer and Information Science, the team chose the ‘genome-wide association study’ in the contest. By applying the sparse linear model, the team designed a mathematical method to find disease-related genes in the human DNA and achieved good results in the analysis of test data provided by the contest organiser.

In the big data era, it has become more and more important to know how to build mathematical models that can explain data for future uses. UM places an emphasis on cultivating students’ skills in mathematical modelling. Previously, UM students won prizes in several other modelling contests, including the Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling of China 2015, and the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling 2016 held in the United States.