[Colloquium] Reminder: Talk by Eric Vigoda, Georgia Institute of Technology
Katie Casey
caseyk at cs.uchicago.edu
Tue Apr 8 07:43:44 CDT 2008
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Place: Kent 120, 1020 E. 58th Street
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Speaker: Eric Vigoda
From: Georgia Institute of Technology
Web page: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vigoda/
Title: Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms
Abstract: In this talk, I'll look at the design and analysis of Markov
Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In the first part of the talk I
will present MCMC algorithms which yielded the first polynomial-time
algorithms for important combinatorial problems. In particular, I'll
present MCMC algorithms for sampling/counting 0-1 contingency tables
with arbitrary row/column sums, and estimating the permanent of a non-
negative matrix. These algorithms require a sophisticated simulated
annealing type approach, with a sequence of problem instances starting
from a trivial instance (infinite temperature) and slowly moving to
the instance of interest (zero temperature).
In the second part of the talk I will discuss the use of MCMC
algorithms in evolutionary biology for phylogenetic reconstruction.
I'll present some recent work in that setting where heterogeneous data
causes the MCMC algorithms to be slow to converge to the desired
posterior distribution.
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Host: Stuart Kurtz
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