2025
Student Seminars: Mark Lee
12:30–1:00 pm Jones 111
Monday, May 5, 2025, at 12:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Mark Lee, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“TBA”
Statistics Colloquium: Jiaying Gu
11:30 am–12:30 pm Jones 303
Jiaying Gu, Department of Economics, University of Toronto
Title: Empirical Bayes for Compound Adaptive Experiments
Abstract:
We investigate Empirical Bayes analysis in the context of compound adaptive experiments, where the arm distribution in each experiment follows a normal distribution with an unknown mean parameter that we aim to estimate. There are two primary approaches to EB estimation: g-modeling, which estimates the prior by maximizing the marginal likelihood, and f-modeling, which directly computes posterior means from the sample distribution of observations. We establish that g-modeling remains a valid EB procedure even when it incorrectly assumes exogenous data collection; it holds regardless of the sampling algorithm used and the endogeneity of sample sizes. One can apply standard g-modeling methods by treating the data as if it were exogenously sampled, and restrict attention to only the sample mean of the data. Remarkably, we show that the risk guarantees established for g-modeling with i.i.d data remain valid for adaptively generated data, with no need for prior knowledge of the sampling algorithm, even when it varies across experiments. In contrast, the f-modeling approach results in biased estimates. We validate the robustness of the g-modeling approach through simulations involving commonly used adaptive algorithms and illustrate its applicability using a real-world dataset comprising multiple sequential experiments.
Student Seminar: YingTing Lu
10:30–11:00 am Jones 111
Monday, May 5, 2025, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
YingTing Lu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Evaluating Hybrid Machine Learning Models for Time Series Forecasting”
Student Seminar: Tony Yang
10:00–10:30 am Jones 111
Monday, May 5, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Tony Yang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Welfare Dynamics in Human-AI Content Creation Competition”
Student Seminar: Mingkun Che
11:30 am–12:00 pm Jones 111
Friday, May 2, 2025, at 11:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Mingkun Che, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Randomization inference for quantiles of individual treatment effects under interference”
Student Seminar: Jay Lee
11:00–11:30 am Jones 111
Friday, May 2, 2025, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Jay Lee, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Discretization Schemes of Total Variation for Image Inpainting and Denoising”
Bahadur Memorial Lectures: John Lafferty (Day 2)
3:30–4:30 pm JCL 390
Title: Abstraction in Artificial and Natural Intelligence: Part II: Models, Mechanisms, and Experiments
Abstract: Reasoning in terms of relations, analogies, and abstraction is a hallmark of human intelligence. How can abstract symbols emerge from distributed, neural representations? One general approach uses an inductive bias for learning called the “relational bottleneck” that is motivated from principles of cognitive neuroscience. We present a framework that builds this inductive bias into machine learning models that transform distributed symbols to implement a form of abstraction. Computational experiments are presented on a broad range of problems. Biologically plausible mechanisms for these models are proposed to shed light on how abstraction may be implemented in the human brain.
Student Seminars: Yating Liu
10:00–11:00 am Jones 111
Thursday, May 1, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Yating Liu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“High-Dimensional Inference Through Latent Structure”
Student Seminar: Aditya Raman
3:30–4:00 pm Jones 111
Wednesday, April 30, 2025, at 3:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Aditya Raman, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Estimation of Approximately Sparse Covariance Operators for Multivariate Gaussian Processes”
Student Seminar: Lorenzo Rangone
3:00–4:00 pm Jones 111
Wednesday, April 30, 2025, at 3:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Lorenzo Rangone, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Combining Machine Learning and Data Assimilation Techniques for Moder Error Correction in Stochastic Dynamical Systems”