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Statistics Seminar Speaker: Jayadev Acharya, 09/19/2018

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Wednesday Sep 19 2018

Statistics Seminar Speaker: Jayadev Acharya, 09/19/2018

4:15pm @ G01 Biotechnology
In Statistics Seminars

The Statistics Seminar kicks off the Fall 2018 semester on Wednesday, September 19, with Jayadev Acharya, an assistant professor in school of ECE, Cornell University, where he joined after a postdoc at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. from UC San Diego. His research interests are in algorithms, information theory, machine learning, and statistics. His received a Jack Wolf Student paper award at ISIT'10, and a Best Paper Honorable Mention at ICML'17 (which is the primary work this talk is based on).

Talk: Estimating Symmetric Properties of Distributions: Maximum Likelihood Strikes Back! 

Abstract: Symmetric distribution properties such as support size, support coverage, entropy, and proximity to uniformity, arise in many applications. Specialized estimators and analysis tools were recently used to derive sample-optimal estimators for each of these properties. We show that a single, simple, plug-in estimator—profile maximum likelihood (PML)—is sample competitive for all symmetric properties, and in particular is asymptotically sample-optimal for all the properties above. 

Our technical results include: - A bound on the performance of general Maximum Likelihood Estimation as a function of the underlying domain size. - Improved estimators for various symmetric properties with sharp phase transitions in the error probability. 

Our results on symmetric properties follow from combining these with Hardy-Ramanujan's bounds on partition numbers. We will conclude with a number of open directions, both computational and statistical. 

Joint work with Hirakendu Das, Alon Orlitsky, and Ananda Theertha Suresh. 

Refreshments will be served following the seminar in 1181 Comstock Hall. 

​

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