2025
Student Seminar: Kairun Zhang
10:00–10:30 am Jones 304
Friday, August 1, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Kairun Zhang Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Learning to Optimize Zeroth-Order Perturbations for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models”
Student Seminar: Caleb Kahan
2:00–2:30 pm Jones 111
Thursday, July 24, 2025, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Caleb Kahan Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Using Statistical Modeling to Identify Associations Between Mosquito Bloodmeal Consumption and the Functional Capabilities of Their Associated Bacteria”
Student Seminar: Tracy Zhu
2:30–3:00 pm Jones 304
Tuesday, July 22, 2025, at 2:30 PM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Tracy Zhu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Kernel Metrics and Relative Density-Ratio Divergence for Reliable Assessment of Image Generators”
Student Seminar: Stephen Ling
9:00–9:30 am Jones 304
Thursday, July 3, 2025, at 9:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Stephen Ling, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Comparative Analysis of Global and Local Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting for Contiguous Spatial Demand Regions”
Student Seminar: Melissa Adrian
10:00 am–12:00 pm Jones 303
Thursday, June 26, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Melissa Adrian, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Machine learning in large-scale data assimilation and stable model selection”
Student Seminars: Wentao Hu
9:30–11:00 am Jones 304
Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at 9:30 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Wentao Hu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Inference for Time Series in Risk Measure and Regression”
Student Seminar: Yu Sen Lui
4:00–4:30 pm Jones 304
Thursday, June 5, 2025, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Yu Sen Lui, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Comparing machine-coded international relations dyadic data with Bayesian nonnegative tensor factorisation”
Student Seminar: Andrew Zhang
4:00–4:30 pm Jones 111
Wednesday, May 28, 2025, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Andrew Zhang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Benchmarking Six Graph Neural Network Methods for Spatial Domain Detection”
Statistics Colloquium: Michael Hudgens
11:30 am–12:30 pm Jones 303
Michael Hudgens, Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Title: Causal Inference with Interference
Abstract: A fundamental assumption usually made in causal inference is that of no interference between individuals (or units), i.e., the potential outcomes of one individual are assumed to be unaffected by the treatment assignment of other individuals. However, in many settings, this assumption obviously does not hold. For example, in infectious diseases, whether one person becomes infected may depend on who else in the population is vaccinated. In this talk we will discuss recent approaches to assessing treatment effects in the presence of interference.
2nd Year Mini Seminars
1:00–4:00 pm Jones 303
Friday, May 16, 2025, from 1:00-4:30 PM, in Jones 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Mini-Seminars for Second-Year PhDs
Moderator: Jimmy Lederman
1:00 pm: Beining Wu, Can Neural Networks Achieve Optimal Computational-statistical Gaps? An Analysis on Single-index Models
1:15 pm: Minjun Cho, Adaptive Robust Confidence Intervals for the Binomial Distribution
1:30 pm: Woohyun Choi, Empirical Bayes Mean Estimation via Summary Statistics under Nonparametric Errors
1:45 pm: Ankur Garg, Learning Discrete Causal Representations from Heterogeneous Domains: A Bayesian Approach
2:00 pm: Junming Guan, Empirical Bayes Principal Component Analysis for Automatic Dimensionality Selection
2:15 pm: Qiyuan Liu, Using gRNA Efficiency to Enhance Detection Power in Perturb-seq
2:30 pm: Tannistha Mondal, Practical Sparse Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis
2:45 pm: David Chen, Yet Another Conditional Independence Test
3:00 pm: Zixuan Wu, Link Prediction using Graph Neural Networks
3:15 pm: Dong Xie, Adaptive confidence interval in robust regression