2025
Student Seminar: Ian Joffe
8:00–8:30 am Jones 111
Monday, November 17, 2025, at 8:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Ian Joffe, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Searching for Linear Representation of Political Sentiment in Large Language Models”
Student Seminar: Nimish Janey
1:00–1:30 pm Jones 111
Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 1:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Nimish Janey, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Expected Shortfall Under Historical Simulation: A Monte Carlo Study ofConditional and Unconditional Backtests”
Student Seminar: Dillon Jones
12:30–1:00 pm Jones 111
Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 12:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Dillan Jones, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Robust and Range-Based GARCH Models with Leverage Effects: A Study of VaR–ES Forecasting”
Student Seminar: Nick Bourdeau
12:00–12:30 pm Jones 111
Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 12:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Nick Bourdeau, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Information-Theoretic Feature Discovery and Forecasting of US Yield Curve Movements”
Student Seminar: Ping Chi Shih
10:00 am–10:30 pm Jones 111
Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Ping Chi Shih, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Task-Aligned Factors: Supervised Autoencoders for CPI Forecasting and Futures Cross-Sections”
Student Seminar: Rahul Kukreja
9:30–10:00 am Jones 111
Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 9:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Rahul Kukreja, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Interpreting Transformers for Time-Series Forecasting”
Student Seminar: Aditi Gupta
3:00–3:30 pm Jones 111
Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Aditi Gupta, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Sparse Inverse–Cholesky Estimation under Model Misspecification”
Student Seminar: Sulagna Ghosh
10:00–11:30 am Jones 111
Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Sulagna Ghosh, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Scalable gradient-based variational inference for flexible point process modeling of spatiotemporal data”
Student Seminar: Xinyue Lou
3:30–4:00 pm Jones 111
Tuesday, November 11, 2025, at 3:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Xinyue Lou, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“Low-Rank Reinforcement Learning for Robust Value Estimation”
Student Seminar: Yuetong Cathy Li
4:00–4:30 pm Jones 111
Monday, November 10, 2025, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master’s Thesis l Presentation
Yuetong Cathy Li, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
“NaCLO: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Large Language Models via Low-Resource Linguistic Puzzles”