Joshua Tobin

Athanasios Georgiadis presents two tutorials to the seminar group, introducing recent work in spatial statistics on May 5th, and nonparametric density estimation on May 12th. The abstracts for both sessions are available below. Seminar 1:Recent progress and open directions in spatial statistics  Abstract: Data’s location plays a decisive role in the extraction of statistical decisions. The … Read more

The seminar series continued on April 28th. PhD Candidates Sebastian Appleby and Tobi Olajubu presented introduced their work to the group. Sebastian is studying Sardex, a community currency network launched in 2010 and is aiming at modelling the network growth. Tobi is developing a method for anomaly detection for data of mixed features. Slides from … Read more

On April 7th, the seminar group welcomed Dr. Florian Maire from the Université de Montréal. Florian introduced recent work detailing a method for comparing two or more competing MCMC algorithms. Details for Florian’s talk are below. Title: Weak Peskun ordering for approximate MCMC comparison Abstract: Despite the popularity of MCMC methods in Bayesian statistics and … Read more

On Wednesday, March 24th, James Ng presented recent work related to nonparametric statistical models based on Gaussian processes on the unit hypersphere. An abstract for James’ talk is below. Abstract We study nonparametric statistical models based on Gaussian processes on the unit hypersphere. We derive convergence rates of posterior distributions for various choices of covariance kernels. We then … Read more

On March 10th, the seminar series welcomed Alexandra Gessner, a PhD student at the Max-Planck Institute in Tübingen, Germany. Alexandra introduced her work which presents a novel sampling method that enables rejection-free sampling from linearly constrained Gaussian domains. An abstract for Alexandra’s talk is given below. Abstract Gaussian densities are ubiquitous in statistics, yet Gaussian probabilities … Read more

On March 3rd, the seminar series hosted the second PhD Lightning Round. Laura introduced her work with ‘Diversity Interaction Models’, particularly in regards to multifunctionality and the interpretation of transformations on the response. Joshua introduced a new project investigating methods for Gaussian mixtures in the presence of numerous clusters.

On February 3rd, the seminar series hosted the first Ph.D. Lightning Round seminar. Daniel Dempsey, Guylain Grange and Joshua Francis presented updates on their work. The slides of their talks are available below.

On February 10th, Alessio Benavoli presented his recent work entitled ‘A unified framework for closed-form nonparametric regression, classification, preference, and mixed problems with Skew Gaussian Processes’. An abstract of Alessio’s talk is available below. Gaussian Processes (GPs) are powerful nonparametric distributions over functions. For real-valued outputs, we can combine the GP prior with a Gaussian likelihood … Read more

On December 2nd, Dr. Bahman Nasseroleslami from the School of Medicine presented his recent work entitled ‘Non-Parametric Rank Statistics for Spectral Power and Coherence.’ An abstracts for Bahman’s talk is below. Despite advances in multivariate spectral analysis of neural signals, the statistical inference of measures such as spectral power and coherence in practical and real-life scenarios … Read more

On November 25th, Sultan Imangaliyev presented his recent work which uses interpretable machine learning methods predict individual patient’s risk of cervical cancer. An abstract for Sultan’s talk is below. Despite the possibility of prevention with cytological screening, cervical cancer remains a significant cause of more than half a million cases per year, killing more than … Read more