Abstract: Spectral methods have been widely used for a large class of challenging problems, ranging from top-K ranking via pairwise comparisons, community detection, factor analysis, among others. Analyses of these spectral methods require super-norm perturbation analysis of top eigenvectors. This allows us to UNIFORMLY approximate elements in eigenvectors by linear functions of the observed random…

Abstract:  The community detection problem has attracted signicant attention in re- cent years, and it has been studied extensively under the framework of a Stochas- tic Block Model (SBM). However, it is well-known that SBMs fit real data very poorly, and various extensions have been suggested to replicate characteristics of real data. The recovered community…

Abstract: Hierarchical clustering enjoys wide popularity because of its fast computation, ease of interpretation, and appealing visualizations via the dendogram and cluster heatmap. Recently, several have proposed and studied convex clustering and biclustering which, similar in spirit to hierarchical clustering, achieve cluster merges via convex fusion penalties. While these techniques enjoy superior statistical performance, they…

MIT Statistics and Data Science Center host guest lecturers from around the world in this weekly seminar.