[Colloquium] Narayana Santhanam, UC Berkeley- TTI-C Talk

[Julia MacGlashan]

When:              Monday, April 7, 10:00am

 

Where:            TTI-C Conference Room

 

Who:                Narayana Santhanam, University of California, Berkeley

 

Topic:              High dimension statistical problems: practice and theory

 

 

For advances in biology, computation and storage, we have invited the "curse
of dimensionality" upon many problems that concern the modern engineer. The
colorful phrase in quotes coined by Bellman refers to the usual inability of
classical methods to handle problem instances wherein the number of
parameters associated with each data sample is comparable to number of
samples we have to work on.

 

In this talk we focus on the problem of discrete distribution estimation in
the undersampled regime, and develop theory to tackle this problem using
ideas from information theory, number theory, combinatorics, analysis as
well as tools in statistical learning. This framework encompasses well known
algorithms including the Laplace and Good Turing estimator.

 

We apply these approaches to classifying text, and obtain very fast
algorithms that stand up to (and in many cases, beat) support vector
machines in both performance and speed.

 

The big picture is to see this work as source coding driven by data
analysis, complementing the traditional communication/storage driven models.
We conclude with a brief preview of some of the directions in which we are
developing this work.

 

Bio: Narayana Santhanam is a postdoctoral researcher hosted by Prof. Martin
Wainwright in UC Berkeley. He obtained the B.Tech degree from IIT Madras,
and MS and PhD with Prof. Alon Orlitsky from UC San Diego. He is interested
in theory and applications related to high dimensional problems, statistical
learning, information theory and combinatorial/probabilistic problems in
general.

 

He is the recipient of the 2006 Information theory society award and the
2003 Capocelli Prize.

 

Contact:          Nathan Srebro, TTI-C         nati at tti-c.org
834-7493

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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