[Colloquium] REMINDER-- MONDAY 2/28: Statistics Seminar: J. M. LANDSBERG, Monday, February 28, 2011, at 4:00 PM, in Eckhart 133.

[Katie Casey]

The University of Chicago
Department of Statistics
Seminar Series

J. M. LANDSBERG
Department of Mathematics
Texas A& M University

Statistics and the Geometry of Tensors
MONDAY, February 28, 2011, at 4:00 PM

133 Eckhart Hall, 5734 S. University Avenue
Refreshments following the seminar in Eckhart 110.

ABSTRACT

I will describe how problems such as blind source separation and the
reconstruction of evolutionary trees lead to questions in geometry. In the first case, quantities
such as kurtosis (or more generally cumulants), viewed as homogeneous polynomials, need to be
decomposed into sums of powers, which leads to the study of symmetric tensor rank. In the
second, the field of algebraic statistics attempts to find polynomials that vanish on
(multidimensional) tables with specified statistical behavior. Then I will survey results, old and
new, from geometry relevant to these questions.


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