[Colloquium] Nina Balcan talk Thurs 8/16 at 12:30 (pizza at 12:00)

[Avrim Blum via Colloquium]

Hi all.  Nina Balcan will be at TTIC and giving a talk this Thurs at 12:30
on Foundations of Data-Driven Algorithm Design.  We'll have pizza at
12:00.   Talk info is below.

Best,
-Avrim

Speaker:

Maria-Florina Balcan
Carnegie Mellon University

Title:

Foundations of Data Driven Algorithm Design.


Abstract:

Data driven algorithm design is an important aspect of modern data science
and algorithm design. Rather than using off the shelf algorithms that only
have worst case performance guarantees, practitioners typically optimize
over large families of parametrized algorithms and tune the parameters of
these algorithms using a training set of problem instances from their
domain to determine a configuration with high expected performance over
future instances. However, most of this work comes with no performance
guarantees. The challenge is that for many combinatorial problems of
significant importance to machine learning, including partitioning and
subset selection problems, a small tweak to the parameters can cause a
cascade of changes in the algorithm’s behavior, so the algorithm’s
performance is a discontinuous function of its parameters. In this talk, I
will present new work that helps put data driven combinatorial algorithm
selection on firm foundations. We provide strong computational and
statistical performance guarantees for several subset selection and
combinatorial partitioning problems (including various forms of
clustering), both for the batch and online scenarios where a collection of
typical problem instances from the given application are presented either
all at once or in an online fashion, respectively.
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