Tags: Colloquium Series

The Statistics Department hosts weekly colloquia on a variety of statistcal subjects, bringing in speakers from around the world.


Qunhua Li

Reproducibility is essential to reliable scientific discovery in large-scale high-throughput biological studies. In this talk, I will present a unified approach to measure reproducibility of findings identified from replicate experiments and select discoveries using reproducibility between replicates. Unlike the usual scalar measures of reproducibility, our approach views reproducibility as when the findings are no longer consistent across…


Julie Patterson

Diagnosis of student mastery or non-mastery of a set of skills (or attributes) can be done using cognitive diagnosis models. Before diagnosing the students, the skills need to be chosen and the appropriate model needs to be selected. In this talk, I will first introduce the process of deconstructing the domain of an introductory statistics course into a hierarchical arrangement of cognitive attributes. I will then introduce three models that can…


Liang Liu

The desire to infer the evolutionary history of a group of species (species tree) should be more viable now that a considerable amount of multilocus molecular data is available. In this talk, I will introduce three statistical methods for reconstructing species trees under the multispecies coalescent model. The Bayesian method can estimate the topology, species divergence times, and population sizes of the species tree, but involves intensive…


Jeffrey S. Morris

In this talk, I will describe flexible new Bayesian methods to analyze functional and quantitative image data. The methods are based on functional mixed models, a framework that can simultaneously model multiple factors and account for correlation within and between the functions. I use an isomorphic basis-space approach to fitting the model, which leads to efficient calculations and adaptive smoothing yet flexibly accommodates the complex…


Jaejik Kim

Salivary glands are important for producing salivary proteins which contribute to host defense, lubrication, and digestion. However, salivary glands are often damaged or destroyed by radiation therapy or surgery for head and neck cancers, or by advanced Sjogrens syndrome. In order to engineer or replace salivary glands, it is important to define the major intracellular pathways of the nuclear program that causes terminal differentiation of the…


Samuel Kou

Stochastic models, diffusion models in particular, are widely used in science, engineering and economics. Inferring the parameter values from data is often complicated by the fact that the underlying stochastic processes are only partially observed. Examples include inference of discretely observed diffusion processes, stochastic volatility models, and double stochastic Poisson (Cox) processes. Likelihood based inference faces the difficulty…


Richard Samworth

If X_1,...,X_n are a random sample from a density f in , then with probability one there exists a unique log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of f. The use of this estimator is attractive because, unlike kernel density estimation, the estimator is fully automatic, with no smoothing parameters to choose. We exhibit an iterative algorithm for computing the estimator and show how the method can be combined with the EM algorithm to fit finite…


Nitis Mukhopadhyay

Lately, I have published on various topics in probability, statistical inference, and linear models. Those research topics arose from teaching mostly graduate level, and some undergraduate level, courses. In this presentation, I will touch upon some of the limitations of invariant tests and Rao-Blackwell-Lehmann-Scheffe type theorems, as well some other interesting ideas with regard to Student’s t-distributions, correlations, independence, and…


Douglas P. Wiens

In work carried out with my colleague Pengfei Li, we construct experimental designs for dose-response studies. The designs are robust against possibly misspecified link functions; to this end they minimize the maximum mean squared error of the estimated dose required to attain a response in 100p% of the target population. Here p might be one particular value - p = .5 corresponds to ED50 estimation - or it might range over an interval of values…


Jing Wang

Additive models have been widely used in nonparametric regression, mainly due to their ability to avoid the problem of the ``curse of dimensionality". When some of the additive components are linear, the model can be further simplified and higher convergence rates can be achieved for the estimation of these linear components. In this paper, we propose a testing procedure for the determination of linear components in nonparametric additive models…
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