[UCR_DataScience] Data Science talk by Prof. Alfonso Landeros, Friday May 24h, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[tsotras at cs.ucr.edu]

We will have a Data Science seminar this Friday, May 24th, 12:00-1:00pm at
the MRB Seminar Room (1st floor).

**** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****

To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/data-science-talk-tickets-910003584217

The talk will be given by Prof. Alfonso Landeros, Statistics Department, UCR

TITLE:
"The Proximal Distance Principle for Constrained Estimation"


ABSTRACT:
Statistical methods often involve solving an optimization problem, such as
in maximum likelihood estimation and regression. The addition of
constraints, either to enforce a hard requirement in estimation or to
regularize solutions, complicates matters. Fortunately, the rich theory of
convex optimization provides ample tools for devising novel methods. In
this talk, I present applications of distance-to-set penalties to
statistical learning problems. Specifically, I will focus on proximal
distance algorithms, based on the MM principle, tailored to various
applications such as regression and discriminant analysis. Special
emphasis is given to sparsity set constraints as a compromise between
exhaustive combinatorial searches and lasso penalization methods that
induce shrinkage.


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Sponsored by the UCR Data Science Center, the purpose of the Data Science
Seminars is to foster collaborations between "core" Data Science faculty
(from CSE/ECE/Stat Departments) and faculty/visitors from other sciences
that face Data Science problems in their research. These informal
gatherings are open to interested faculty and graduate students. Each
meeting will start with a talk describing research problems and then a
discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for possible
collaborations etc.

A full list of previous seminars appears at:
http://datascience.ucr.edu/seminars

Forward this email to other colleagues or graduate students in your lab
that may be interested. Moreover, if you are interested in giving a Data
Science related talk, please contact me (tsotras at cs.ucr.edu).

Sincerely,
Vassilis Tsotras
Professor, CSE Department
co-Director, Data Science Major
Director, MS in Computational Data Science