Pattern Theory Lunch Seminar Series

Brown University

DIVISION OF APPLIED MATHEMATICS

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Upcoming Talks

Wednesday, Oct 9, 2019

12-1pm, 182 George St, Room 110

Knockoffs or perturbations, that is a question

Jun S Liu

Professor
Department of Statistics
Harvard University

Simultaneously finding multiple influential variables and controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) for linear regression models is a fundamental problem with a long history. Researchers recently have proposed and examined a few innovative approaches surrounding the idea of creating “knockoff” variables (like spike-ins in biological experiments) to control FDR. As opposed to creating knockoffs, a classical statistical idea is to introduce perturbations and examine the impacts. We introduce here a perturbation-based Gaussian Mirror (GM) method, which creates for each predictor variable a pair of perturbed “mirror variables” by adding and subtracting a randomly generated Gaussian random variable, and proceeds with a certain regression method, such as the ordinary least-square or the Lasso. The mirror variables naturally lead to a test statistic highly effective for controlling the FDR. The proposed GM method does not require strong conditions for the covariates, nor any knowledge of the noise level and relative magnitudes of dimension p and sample size n. We observe that the GM method is more powerful than many existing methods in selecting important variables, subject to the control of FDR especially under the case when high correlations among the covariates exist. Additionally, we provide a method to reliably estimate a confidence interval and upper bound for the number of false discoveries. If time permits, I will also discuss a simpler bootstrap-type perturbation method for estimating FDRs, which is also more powerful than knockoff methods when the predictors are reasonably correlated. The presentation is based on joint work with Xing Xin and Chenguang Dai.

[food will be provided]

Fall 2019 Schedule

Wednesdays, 12-1pm, 182 George St, Room 110 [lunch is provided]

Oct 9, 2019 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Knockoffs or perturbations, that is a question

Jun Liu (Harvard)

Spring 2020 Schedule

Wednesdays, 12-1pm, 182 George St, Room 110 [lunch is provided]

2018-2019 Schedule

Apr 16, 2019 (Tues, 11:00am) ABSTRACT WEBSITE

A Representational Theory of Grid Cells

Ying Nian Wu (UCLA)

Feb 13, 2019 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

A combinatorial/algebraic topological approach to nonlinear dynamics

Konstantin Mischaikow (Rutgers)

Jan 30, 2019 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Statistical models of large graphs and networks

Peter Orbanz (Columbia)

Dec 5, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Hidden Physics Models: Machine Learning of Non-Linear Partial Differential Equations

Maziar Raissi (Brown)

Nov 7, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Visual Program Induction

Daniel Ritchie (Brown)

Oct 24, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Approximate Message Passing Algorithms for High Dimensional Statistical Estimation

Cynthia Rush (Columbia)

Oct 17, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Unsupervised Learning for Large Scale Medical Image Analysis

Adrian Dalca (MIT, MGH)

Oct 3, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Variable Prioritization in “Black Box” Statistical Methods

Lorin Crawford (Brown)

2017-2018 Schedule

May 9, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Using the Morse Smale complex to understand 3D shape constancy

Ben Kunsberg (Brown)

May 2, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

The synchronization problem for Kuramoto oscillators and beyond

Javier Morales (U. of Maryland)

Apr 25, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Machine Learning in a Setting of Ordinal Distance Information

Matthäus Kleindessner (Rutgers)

Apr 11, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Recent Advances in Elastic Functional and Shape Data Analysis

Anuj Srivistava (Florida State)

Mar 21, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Measure transport for Bayesian inference: theory and applications

Daniele Bigoni (MIT)

Feb 7, 2018 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Causes and Consequences of Human Genomic Variation

Sohini Ramachandran (Brown)

Dec 6, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Advancing Editing, Exploration, and Interaction for Video

James Tompkin (Brown)

Nov 29, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Sequential Bayesian inference via low-dimensional couplings

Youssef Marzouk (MIT)

Nov 8, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Toward perceptually consistent stereo

Todd Zickler (Harvard)

Nov 1, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Sifting through Measures on Networks: From a Theoretical Framework to an Empirical Guide

Tina Eliassi-Rad (Northeastern)

Oct 25, 2017 ABSTRACT

Feature Driven Exploration of Images Using Topology

Atilla Gyulassy (U. of Utah)

Oct 11, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Multireference Alignment with Nonperiodic Distribution is Easier

Nir Sharon (Princeton)

Sep 20, 2017 ABSTRACT

Graph-based Bayesian learning: continuum limits and algorithms

Daniel Sanz-Alonso (Brown)

2016-2017 Schedule

May 3, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

PCA from noisy linearly transformed measurements

Amit Singer (Princeton)

April 26, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Numerical Gaussian Processes (Physics Informed Learning Machines)

Maziar Raissi (Brown)

April 19, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Inference in Dynamical Systems

Sayan Mukherjee (Duke)

March 8, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Tropical coordinates on the space of persistence barcodes

Sara Kalisnik Verovsek (Brown)

February 8, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Deformation models for image and shape matching

Ronen Basri (Weizmann Institute of Science)

February 1, 2017 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Non-equilibrium transitions between metastable patterns in populations of motile bacteria

Eric Vanden-Eijnden (NYU)

November 30, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

How high-order image statistics shape cortical visual processing

Jonathan Victor (Cornell)

November 9, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Joint Scientific Computing / Pattern Theory Seminar

Solution uncertainty quantification for differential equations

Oksana Chkrebtii (Ohio State)

November 2, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Fast quantification of uncertainty and robustness with variational Bayes

Tamara Broderick (MIT)

October 5, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Robust Bayesian inference via coarsening

Jeffrey Miller (Harvard)

September 28, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

New Perspectives on Importance Sampling

Daniel Sanz Alonso (Brown)

September 21, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Structure-based comparisons for sequential data

Katherine Kinnaird (Brown)

September 14, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Discovering the Nature of Nonlinear Relationships

Joshua Vogelstein (Johns Hopkins)

2015-2016 Schedule

May 18, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Learning Lattice Operators used in Computer Vision Tasks

Junior Barrera (Sao Paulo)

April 20, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Learning Causal Graphical Models of Large-Scale Systems

David Jensen (UMass Amherst)

March 23, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

The Dynamics of the Unconscious Brain Under General Anesthesia

Emery Brown (MIT/Harvard)

March 16, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

A simple network model for a variety of Delay Match to Sample tasks

Yali Amit (Chicago)

March 2, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

The shape space defined by the Gromov-Wasserstein distance

Facundo Memoli (Ohio State)

February 17, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

New applications and algorithms for submodular probabilistic models

Stefanie Jegelka (MIT)

February 3, 2016 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Constructing representations using Bayesian nonparametrics and connections between human knowledge, optimal foraging, and random walks on graphs

Joe Austerweil (Brown)

November 18, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Big data, Google and disease detection: the statistical story

Samuel Kou (Harvard)

October 28, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

A stochastic model for Gompertzian growth

Benar Svaiter (IMPA, Brazil)

October 14, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Importance sampling in large-scale machine learning problems: why it works and how it can help

Rachel Ward (UT Austin)

October 7, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Local Shape from Shading with a Generic Constraint

Ben Kunsberg (Brown)

September 23, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Continuum limit of total variation on point clouds

Nicolas Garcia-Trillos (Brown)

September 9, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Random matrix theory based analysis of the correlation structure of protein sequences

Lucy Colwell (Cambridge)

2014-2015 Schedule

May 6, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Two Recent Information Theoretic Variations on the Theme of Patterns in Security

Muriel Medard (MIT)

April 1, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Adaptive Bayesian Estimation of Conditional Densities

Andriy Norets (Brown)

March 18, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Using evolutionary sequence variation to make inferences about protein structure and function

Lucy Colwell (Cambridge)

March 4, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

From Pixels to Local Layers: Exploring Flexible Representations for Motion Estimation

Deqing Sun (Harvard)

February 25, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Scaling and Generalizing Variational Inference

David Blei (Columbia)

February 4, 2015 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Computational reconstruction and modeling of multicellular dynamics from 3D+time in vivo imaging of animal early embryogenesis. Extension to Artificial Life.

René Doursat (CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique, Paris)

December 3, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Hypothesis-guided dimensionality reduction and its application to large-scale neuroscience

John Cunningham (Columbia)

Thursday, November 20, 2014 [4-5pm, Wilson 102] ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Joint Pattern Theory / LCDS Seminar

Geometric graph-based methods for high dimensional data

Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA)

November 12, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Multiscale models for shapes and images

Pedro Felzenszwalb (Brown)

November 5, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Cross-Study Validation versus Randomized Cross-Validation as Data Accumulate

Lo-Bin Chang (Johns Hopkins)

October 22, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Algorithms for Interpretable Machine Learning

Cynthia Rudin (MIT)

October 8, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

A Simple Pattern-Theoretic Representation

Oren Freifeld (MIT)

October 1, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Statistical mechanics for real biological networks

William Bialek (Princeton)

2013-2014 Schedule

April 30, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Division of Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

Computational Anatomy, High Throughput Neuro-Imaging Informatics, and the BrainCloud

Michael Miller (Johns Hopkins)

April 23, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Climate informatics: Recent advances and challenge problems for machine learning in climate science

Claire Monteleoni (George Washington University)

April 16, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

The Blended Paradigm: A Bayesian approach to handling outliers and misspecified models

Steven MacEachern (Ohio State)

April 9, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Division of Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

The computational magic of the ventral stream: a theory (and why some deep architectures work)

Tomaso Poggio (MIT)

April 2, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Can connectomics help us understand neural computation? Insights from the fly visual system

Dmitri Chklovskii (Janelia Farm)

March 12, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Robust inference on parameters via particle filters and sandwich covariance matrices

Neil Shephard (Harvard)

February 26, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Productivity and reuse in language: Non-parametric Bayesian models of lexical acquisition

Timothy O'Donnell (MIT)

February 12, 2014 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Challenging issues in likelihood inference on mixture models

Daeyoung Kim (UMass Amherst)

December 4, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Big data in neuroscience: Where is the information?

Joachim Buhmann (ETH Zurich)

November 20, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Interactive Demonstrations in the Brown Robotics Lab [in CIT 134]

Chad Jenkins (Brown)

November 6, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Dirichlet process mixture inconsistency for the number of components, and dimension mixture models

Jeffrey Miller (Brown)

October 23, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

High-dimensional statistics

Sahand Negahban (Yale)

October 9, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Model selection in a large compositional space

Roger Grosse (MIT)

September 11, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Parameter estimation robust to low-frequency contamination

Adam McCloskey (Brown)

2012-2013 Schedule

May 8, 2013 ABSTRACT

Scale-invariance and metrics on spaces of plane curves

Matt Feiszli

April 17, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Towards a general theory of human learning and reasoning

Charles Kemp (Carnegie Mellon)

April 10, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Encoding binary neural codes in networks of threshold-linear neurons

Carina Curto (Nebraska-Lincoln)

April 3, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Learning to behave by reading

Regina Barzilay (MIT)

March 20, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Sparse superposition codes: Communication by regression

Andrew Barron (Yale)

February 27, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Bayesian model sampling in reinforcement learning

Michael Littman (Brown)

February 20, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Nonstationary modeling through dimension expansion

Luke Bornn (Harvard)

January 30, 2013 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Composite likelihood

Nancy Reid (Toronto)

November 14, 2012 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Linking signaling pathways and dynamic regulatory networks

Anthony Gitter (Microsoft Research)

November 7, 2012 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Natural image statistics and image restoration

Yair Weiss (Hebrew University)

October 24, 2012 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Active learning under margin assumptions

Sivan Sabato (Microsoft Research)

October 3, 2012 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Recovering large networks via optimizing non-likelihood functions

Rossi Luo (Brown)

2011-2012 Schedule

May 16, 2012 ABSTRACT WEBSITE

Division of Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

Lessons from photographing and identifying the world's plant species

Peter Belhumeur (Columbia)

May 9, 2012 ABSTRACT

Computational challenges in molecular medicine

Donald Geman (Johns Hopkins)

April 25, 2012 ABSTRACT

Hallucinating scene detail and recognizing scene attributes

James Hays (Brown)

April 18, 2012 ABSTRACT

LP relaxations for global models in natural language processing

Sebastian Riedel (UMass)

March 28, 2012 ABSTRACT

What is the neural foundation of the vision process?

Christoph von der Malsburg (Frankfurt IAS)

March 21, 2012 ABSTRACT

The tree of life and the evolution of genome function

Casey Dunn (Brown)

February 8, 2012 ABSTRACT

Exploiting sparse structure by spectral connectivity analysis

Ann Lee (Carnegie Mellon)

February 1, 2012 ABSTRACT

Statistical analysis of populations with interacting and interfering units

Edo Airoldi (Harvard)

November 30, 2011 ABSTRACT

Exploring the role of ventral premotor cortex in reach-to-grasp movements: neural trajectories through spike train similarity space

Carlos Vargas-Irwin (Brown)

November 2, 2011 ABSTRACT

Perceptual Fragments: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Use of Shape in Object Recognition

Benjamin Kimia (Brown)

October 19, 2011 ABSTRACT

Statistical challenges in neural data analysis

Liam Paninski (Columbia)

October 12, 2011 ABSTRACT

Spectral Methods for Learning Graphical Models

Sham Kakade (UPenn & MRNE)

October 5, 2011 ABSTRACT

Dynamic regulation of decision threshold by frontal cortex and basal ganglia

Michael Frank (Brown)

September 14, 2011 ABSTRACT

Non-parametric Priors for Segmentation of Medical Images

Polina Golland (MIT)

2010-2011 Schedule

May 11, 2011 ABSTRACT

Division of Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

Statistical structures of natural scenes and neural ensembles activities

Tai Sing Lee (Carnegie Mellon)

May 4, 2011 ABSTRACT

Logistic Regression on Data Streams

Kevin Kochanek (US Department of Defense)

April 20, 2011 ABSTRACT

Self-folding of polyhedra-- experiments and a little theory

Govind Menon (Brown)

April 6, 2011 ABSTRACT

Division of Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

A High-Throughput Screening Approach to Biologically-Inspired Object Recognition

David Cox (Rowland Institute at Harvard)

March 16, 2011 ABSTRACT

Solving Inference, Optimization, and Constraint Satisfaction Problems with the Divide & Concur and Belief Propagation Message-Passing Algorithms

Jonathan Yedidia (MERL)

March 9, 2011 ABSTRACT

A history of applying principal component analyses to human population genetic data

Sohini Ramachandran (Brown)

February 16, 2011 ABSTRACT

Patterns of Thought (in humanoid robots)

Yiannis Aloimonos (University of Maryland)

February 9, 2011 ABSTRACT

Division of Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

Learning on Analytic Manifolds

Fatih Porikli (MERL)

November 17, 2010 ABSTRACT

Point process adaptive filters and the analysis of ensemble neural spiking activity

Uri Eden (Boston University)

November 3, 2010 ABSTRACT

Bottom-up and top-down processing in visual perception

Thomas Serre (Brown)

October 20, 2010 ABSTRACT

Discovering Influential Variables: A Partition Retention Approach

Herman Chernoff (Harvard)

October 6, 2010 ABSTRACT

(CIT 241, Swig Boardroom)

Learning Probabilistic Models with Deep Hierarchical Structures

Ruslan Salakhutdinov (MIT)

2009-2010 Schedule

May 10, 2010 ABSTRACT

Shared Segmentation of Natural Scenes using Dependent Pitman-Yor Processes

Erik Sudderth (Brown)

April 23, 2010 ABSTRACT

A Generative Model Approach to Fraud Detection

Brian Lucena (Guardian Analytics, Inc.)

April 21, 2010 ABSTRACT

Segmentation of Image Ensembles via Latent Atlases

Tammy Riklin-Raviv (MIT)

April 16, 2010 ABSTRACT

Applied Mathematics / Center for Statistical Sciences Seminar

Multi-Resolution Inference of Stochastic Models from Partially Observed Data

Samuel Kou (Harvard)

April 14, 2010 ABSTRACT

Preserving knowledge through media transitions: ushering the heritage of India into the digital age

Peter Scharf (Brown)

April 9, 2010 ABSTRACT

Analysis of Molecular Networks

Mark Gerstein (Yale)

April 7, 2010 ABSTRACT

Geometry of the space of 2D shapes equipped with the Weil-Petersson metric

Sergey Kushnarev (Brown)

March 24, 2010 ABSTRACT

Unsupervised Part of Speech Tagging: From graphical models to statistical models to "biological" models

Michael Lamar (Brown)

March 17, 2010 ABSTRACT

Learning in Social Networks with Signals of Bounded Informativeness

Ilan Lobel (Microsoft Research New England)

March 12, 2010 ABSTRACT

Graphs and polytopes: learning structures with linear programming relaxations

Tommi Jaakkola (MIT)

March 10, 2010 ABSTRACT

Respondent-Driven Sampling for Networks: Degrees of Uncertainty with Uncertain Degrees

Joe Blitzstein (Harvard)

March 3, 2010 ABSTRACT

Topic Models: Priors, Stop Words and Languages

Hanna Wallach (UMass)

February 17, 2010 ABSTRACT

Message Passing Algorithms for Compressed Sensing

Andrea Montanari (Stanford)

February 12, 2010 ABSTRACT

Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

Learning Hierarchies of Sparse Visual Features

Yann LeCun (Courant)

February 3, 2010 ABSTRACT

An analysis of connectivity in neuronal population recordings

Asohan Amarasingham (Rutgers)

November 20, 2009 ABSTRACT

Applied Mathematics / Center for Statistical Sciences Seminar

Error controls for multiple hypothesis testing

Zhiyi Chi (U Conn)

November 18, 2009 ABSTRACT

Spectral Filtering Approaches to Machine Learning

Lorenzo Rosasco (MIT)

November 11, 2009 ABSTRACT

Generative Models for Image Analysis

Lo-Bin Chang (Brown)

November 6, 2009 ABSTRACT

Applied Mathematics / Center for Vision Research Seminar

Understanding Visual Scenes

Antonio Torralba (MIT)

November 2, 2009 ABSTRACT

Center for Statistical Sciences / Applied Mathematics Seminar

Application of Heteroskedastic Spatial Models to Computer Experiments

Richard A. Davis (Columbia)

October 28, 2009 ABSTRACT

Statistical Analysis of Climate Ecosystem Dynamics

Surajit Ray (Boston University)

October 21, 2009 ABSTRACT

Recent Advances on the Geometry of the Riemannian Manifold of Landmarks

Mario Micheli (UCLA)

October 14, 2009 ABSTRACT

SIFT Flow: Dense Scene Alignment and Its Applications

Ce Liu (Microsoft Research New England)

October 7, 2009 ABSTRACT

The probabilistic language of thought

Noah Goodman (MIT)

September 30, 2009 ABSTRACT

Learning maximum-entropy models of salience via EM

Micha Elsner (Brown)

September 23, 2009 ABSTRACT

Latent Socio-Spatial Process Model for Social Networks

Crystal Linkletter (Brown)

September 16, 2009 ABSTRACT

Organizational meeting & Conditional inference for non-stationary data

Matthew Harrison (Brown)