The Statistics Seminar speaker for Wednesday, September 11, 2019 is Genevera Allen, an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistics and Computer Science at Rice University. Dr. Allen is an investigator in the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine. She is also the Founder and Faculty Director of the Rice Center for Transforming Data to Knowledge, informally called the Rice D2K Lab.
Talk: Data Integration: Data-Driven Discovery from Diverse Data Sources
Abstract: Data integration, or the strategic analysis of multiple sources of data simultaneously, can often lead to discoveries that may be hidden in individual analyses of a single data source. In this talk, we present several new techniques for data integration of mixed, multi-view data where multiple sets of features, possibly each of a different domain, are measured for the same set of samples. This type of data is common in heathcare, biomedicine, national security, multi-senor recordings, multi-modal imaging, and online advertising, among others. In this talk, we specifically highlight how mixed graphical models and new feature selection techniques for mixed, mutli-view data allow us to explore relationships amongst features from different domains. Next, we present new frameworks for integrated principal components analysis and integrated generalized convex clustering that leverage diverse data sources to discover joint patterns amongst the samples. We apply these techniques to integrative genomic studies in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases to make scientific discoveries that would not be possible from analysis of a single data set.