Student Seminars

Autumn Quarter 2024

Thursday, November 21, 2024, at 9:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Kiho Park, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"TBA"

Friday, November 15, 2024, at 3:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Annie Xie, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"TBA"

Wednesday, October 30, 2024, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Aaron Ludkowski, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Knapsacks and Basketball: A Cost-Driven Analysis of NCAA Men’s Tournament Teams"

Friday, October 25, 2024, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Guilherme (Will) Biem, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
""Dynamic Covariance Shrinkage Estimators for High Dimensional Time Series""

Summer Quarter 2024

August

Wednesday, August 14, 2024, at 12:00 PM, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Yi Wang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Multiscale methods for semidefinite programming"

July

Monday, July 29, 2024, at 10:00 AM, via Zoom Meeting
Dissertation Proposal Presentation 
Soumyabrata Kundu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Steerable Architectures for Vision"

Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation Presentation
Daniel Gorman, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago

"An Application of Modeling Variation in Intensive Longitudinal Data of Behavioral and Mental Health Responses from an Undergraduate Student Population"

Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation 
Ruisi Liu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"A Mixed-Effects Analysis of Behavioral Change in the MBC2 Trial"

Thursday, July 25, 2024, at 9:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation Presentation
Zikai Li, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Batch-Adaptive Pair-Matching for Improving Efficiency in Experimental Designs"

Tuesday, July 23, 2024, at 10:00 AM, Via Zoom Meeting
Master's Thesis Presentation Presentation
Yudan Tang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Continual Learning: Outliers and Diffusion-based Generative Replay"

Monday, July 8, 2024, at 9:00 AM, Zoom Presentation
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Sounak Paul, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"On learning and optimization in inverse problems with group structured latent variables"

Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Chih-Hsuan Wu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Statistical Methods for Single-Cell RNA Data"

Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Danlei Angelica Sun, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Random-Effect Pattern-Mixture Models — Application on EMA-Recorded Tobacco Use and Mood Swings"

Wednesday, July 3, 2024, at 9:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Huanlin Zhou, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Overcoming the "feast or famine" effect: improved interaction testing in GWAS"

Monday, July 1, 2024, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Vasileios (Bill) Katsianos, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Genetic Association Analysis of Phenotypes Jointly Influenced by a Pair of Interacting Organisms"

June

Thursday, June 20, 2024, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Defense Presentation
Huy Dang Tran, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"New Methodologies for High-Dimensional Data"

Monday, June 10, 2024, at 9:00 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Rohan Hore, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Localized hypotheses: the impact of randomization on hardness in distribution-free inference"

Monday, June 3, 2024, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Yu Gui, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Statistical learning with distribution shift: sample reweighting and constrained boosting for robustness"

Past Seminars

Spring Quarter 2024

Zoom links will be provided in their corresponding email announcements.

May

Friday, May 24, 2024, at 9:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Wentao Hu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Granger Causality Test in High Dimensional Time Series"

Tuesday, May 21, 2024, at 2:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Lin Gui, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Unleash the power of special distributions in statistics and machine learning"

Friday, May 17, 2024, from 1:00-4:30 PM, in Jones 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Mini-Seminars for Second-Year PhDs
Moderator: Sean O-Hagan

  • 1:00 pm: Sulagna Ghosh, Wei' Till You Die (WeiTYD)
  • 1:15 pm: Or Goldreich, Self-Normalized Moderate Deviations for SGD Sequences
  • 1:30 pm: John Hood, The Allocore Tensor Decomposition for Sparse Count Data
  • 1:45 pm: Yeo Jin Jung, Topic Modeling for Graph Data
  • 2:00 pm: James Lederman, A Data Augmentation Approach to Modeling Underdispersed Count Data
  • 2:15 pm: Amber Lee, Veil of Elections
  • 2:30 pm: Jeonghwan Lee, Regret minimization is all you need for the off-policy estimation with adaptively collected data
  • 2:45 pm: Yating Liu, Tensor Topic Modeling via HOSVD
  • 3:00 pm: Raphael Rossellini, A New Definition of Calibration
  • 3:15 pm: Joonyung Shin, Sampling graph colorings
  • 3:30 pm: Claire Tseng, Spiking statistics in dichotomous neural networks
  • 3:45 pm: Qiaosen Wang, Model-Agnostic Top-K Ranking with Centrality Scores
  • 4:00 pm: Ziyang Wei, Language Models with Conformal Factuality Guarantees

Wednesday, May 15, 2024, at 4:00 PM, in Wieboldt 130, 1050 E 59th Street
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Yuepeng Yang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Ranking from Sparse Comparison Data"

Wednesday, May 15, 2024, at 3:00 PM, in Harper Memorial 145, 1116 E. 59th Street
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Jinwen Yang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Scale up and Speed up Classic Optimization on Modern Computing Architectures"

Tuesday, May 14, 2024, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Presentation
Joonsuk Kang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Learning Meaningful Representations of Data with Empirical Bayes Methods"

Monday, May 13, 2024, at 3:00 PM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Zihao Wang, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Interpreting and Steering Large Generative Models"

Thursday, May 2, 2024, at 3:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Diemeng Hu, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Application of Mixed Effects Location Scale Models in Analyzing Environmental Impacts on Sedentary Behavior"

Thursday, May 2, 2024, at 11:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Alexander Vattakkattu, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Simulations of Random Walk Loop Soups"

Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 2:30 PM, in Searle 236, 5735 S Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Yichen Ji, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Realized Volatility Forecasting with Machine Learning"

Thursday, May 1, 2024, at 2:00 PM, in Searle 236, 5735 S Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Xiaoran Cheng, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Large Language Models and Textual Analysis for Stock Return Prediction"

Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 1:30 PM, in Searle 236, 5735 S Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Chad Schmerling, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"A Granular Approach: Constructing and Evaluating Financial Factors at High-Frequency Intervals"

Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Zhanpeng Song, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Approaches to Spectral Estimation of Covariance for High-Dimensional Data Analysis"

Wednesday, May 1, 2024, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Yifang Zhang, Department of Statistic, The University of Chicago
"Volatility Forecasting and VaR Performance: Insights from Emerging Markets"

April

Tuesday, April 30, 2024, at 3:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Theodora Ko, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Minimizing Empty Truck Miles Driven via Decision-Theoretic Online Learning and Link Prediction on a Temporal Transportation Graph"

Tuesday, April 30, 2024, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Haoyuan Mao, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Apply Generalized Gamma Distribution in Two part MELS model"

Tuesday, April 30, 2024, at 1:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Yuqi Niu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"The Application of a Hybrid Garch-type Model with Quantile Regression Neural Network on the Estimation of Value-at-Risk of Corporate Stocks"

Tuesday, April 30, 2024, at 1:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Ruiqin Li, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Variance Estimation for the Calibration Estimator"

Tuesday, April 30, at 12:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Yibei Cai, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Examination on the effectiveness of Time Series Momentum"

Tuesday, April 30, at 12:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Sheng-Hau Peng, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Optimizing Sentiment Analysis through Hyperparameter Tuning: An Alternative Way to Revisit SESTM Algorithm"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 2:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Huanyu Zhang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Statler: State-Maintaining Language Models for Embodied Reasoning"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Xingyu Piao, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Impact of a country’s GDP on the number of students studying in the U.S. from that country"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 11:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Yiyuan (Chloe) Zhang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"High-Dimensional Time Series: VAR Model Efficacy Across Lag Structures"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Xinyu Wang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Exploring the mechanism of self-attention"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Qizhong Zhang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"DDSTPP: Denoising Diffusion Spatial Temporal Point Process"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 9:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Shu-Hsiang Wang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Sample Size Determination Methods for Non-Randomized Studies with Historical Data"

Monday, April 29, 2024, at 8:50 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Hao Zhu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Time Series and Machine Learning Approaches for Forecasting Inflation in the USA"

Friday, April 26, 2024, at 2:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Mengqi Liu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Revised Local Permutation Test for Conditional Independence Test"

Friday, April 26, 2024, at 10:30 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Austin Koort, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Evaluating the Effect of Round Type on Collegiate Policy Debate Outcomes"

Friday, April 26, 2024, at 10:00 AM, in Jones 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Daniel Li, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Simulation Study for Spatially Coherent Topic Modeling Utilizing Graph Structure"

Thursday, April 25, 2024, at 3:30 PM, in Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Xingyu Qu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Exploring Win Determinants in the English Premier League: Insights from Poisson Mixed-Effects Modeling and Skellam Process"

Thursday, April 25, 2024, at 3:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Proposal Presentation
Melissa Adrian, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Estimation, prediction, and uncertainty quantification using sparse data in weather applications"

Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at 3:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Sida (Star) Li, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Beyond Vanilla Metropolis-adjusted Langevin Algorithms: A Simulation-based Survey"

Wednesday, April 24, 2024, at 8:25 AM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Presentation
Yuhan Liu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"NON-PARAMETRIC CHANGE POINT ANALYSIS: TACKLING IRREGULAR CONDITIONS IN UNI-VARIATE AND MULTIVARIATE DATA"

Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at 4:00 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Zijian Zhao, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Knowledge Editing through Contrastive Fine-tuning"

Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at 2:30 PM, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Ruixin Dai, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"FDR Control in ep-BH Procedure with Dependent P-values and E-values

Friday, April 19, 2024, at 10:00 am, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Chenfeng Li, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Examining the Interplay Between Politicians' Facial Expressions in Media Images and News Corporation Bias"

Wednesday, April 17, 2024, at 2:00 PM, Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Xinmeng (Simone) Zhang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Intraclass Correlation Coefficient Confidence Interval Derivation and Application in Longitudinal Data Analysis

Thursday, April 11, 2024, 10:00 AM, Jones 304, 5747 S. University Ave
PhD Dissertation Presentation
Wanrong Zhu, Department of Statistics, University of Chicago
"Statistical Inference in Online Learning: Covariance Matrix Estimation and Confidence Interval Construction"

Winter Quarter 2024

Zoom links will be provided in their corresponding email announcements.

February

Monday, February 26, 2024, at 3:00 pm, Jones 304, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
PhD Dissertation Presentation
Angzhi Fan, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Object Detection and Panoptic Segmentation through Likelihood Optimizations"

Thursday, February 15, 2024, at 2:00 pm, Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Ke Shao, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Deep Generative Modeling for Cryo-EM"

Tuesday, February 13, 2024, at 3:00 pm, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Tonghun Lee, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
Contract Design for Digital Freight Platform

Tuesday, February 13, 2024, at 2:30 pm, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Matthew Yang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Latent Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Tuesday, February 13, 2024, at 2:00 pm, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Chenyang Lu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Association Testing for Multivariate Phenotypes"

Tuesday, February 13, 2024, at 1:30 pm, in Jones 111, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Hong Won Jang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"News sentiment-driven portfolios using large language models"

Thursday, February 8, 2024, at 2:00 pm, in Jones 303, 5747 S. Ellis Avenue
Master's Thesis Presentation
Paarth Sharma, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Modeling the Prior with Normalizing Flows for Autoencoder-based Vision Models"

January

Monday, January 29, 2024, at 12:30 pm, in Jones 226 and via Zoom (HYBRID TALK)
Master's Thesis Presentation
Yang Xu, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"Nonnegative Constraints on Image Reconstruction"

Thursday, January 18, 2024, at 2:00 pm, via Zoom
Master's Thesis Presentation
Junchi Zhang, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
"NLP Application in Clinical Records— Using BERT and Edit Distance for Spell Check Pipeline"

Autumn Quarter 2023

Zoom links will be provided in their corresponding email announcements.

November

October

Summer Quarter 2023

Zoom links will be provided in their corresponding email announcements.

August

July

June

Spring Quarter 2023

May

April

Winter Quarter 2023

March

February

January

Autumn Quarter 2022

December

November

October

September

Summer Quarter 2022

July

Spring Quarter 2022

May

April

Winter Quarter 2022

March

February

December

Autumn Quarter 2021

NOVEMBER

Summer Quarter 2021

August

  • Tuesday, August 24, 2021, at 2:00 PM Central Daylight  Time (US & Canada), via Zoom
    Dissertation Proposal Presentation
    Nathan Gill, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
    "Variance Decomposition in Several Settings"

July

Spring Quarter 2021

May

  • Friday, May 28, 2021, at 3:00-5:00 PM Central Daylight Time, via Zoom
    Mini-Seminars Day 2
    Moderator:  Daniel Xiang
    Video Mini-Seminars Day 2
    • Huy Dang Tran, “Graph Neural Networks“
    • Yuhan Liu, “The Time, The Gaussianity, and The Connectome“
    • Sounak Paul, “Differentially Private Networks“
    • Omar Ghattas, “Valid Statistical Inference with Random Forests“
    • YoonHaeng Hur, “Optimal Transport for Data Science“
    • Irina Cristali, “Using Embeddings for Estimating Causal Effects Over Social Networks“
  • Thursday, May 27, 2021, at 12:00-2:00 PM Central Daylight Time, via Zoom
    Mini-Seminars Day 1
    Moderator:  Abby Stevens
    Video Mini-Seminars Day 1 
    • (Joon) Joonsuk Kang, “Not All Factor Loadings Are Created Equal“
    • Wei Kuang, “Over-parameterized Matrix Sensing with Factorized Gradient Descent“
    • Subhodh Kotekal, “Statistical Limits of Sparse Mixture Detection“
    • Anghzi Fan, “WGAN and Its Regularization“
    • (Bill) Vasileios Katsianos, “Quantifying the Uncertainty in Drug-Drug Interaction Predictions“
    • Thursday, May 13, 2021, at 1:00 PM Central Daylight Time (US &Canada), via Zoom
    • Master's Thesis Presentation
    • Tianrui Hou, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
    • "Macroeconomic Nowcasting via Bootstrap Particle Filtering"

April

Winter Quarter 2021

March

February

January

  • Wednesday, January 20, 2021, at 9:30 AM Central Standard Time (US & Canada), via Zoom
    Master's Thesis Presentation
    Wenxuan Guo, Department of Statistics, The University of Chicago
    "Statistics of the Shepp p-Product"

Autumn Quarter 2020

December

November

October

September