Date: 2017-10-27

Time: 15:30-16:30

Location: BURN 1205

Abstract:

In many current applications, scientists can easily measure a very large number of variables (for example, hundreds of protein levels), some of which are expected be useful to explain or predict a specific response variable of interest. These potential explanatory variables are most likely to contain redundant or irrelevant information, and in many cases, their quality and reliability may be suspect. We developed two penalized robust regression estimators that can be used to identify a useful subset of explanatory variables to predict the response, while protecting the resulting estimator against possible aberrant observations in the data set. Using an elastic net penalty, the proposed estimator can be used to select variables, even in cases with more variables than observations or when many of the candidate explanatory variables are correlated. In this talk, I will present the new estimator and an algorithm to compute it. I will also illustrate its performance in a simulation study and a real data set. This is joint work with Professor Matias Salibian-Barrera, my PhD student David Kepplinger, and my PDF Ezequiel Smuggler.

Speaker

Gabriela V. Cohen Freue has completed her PhD in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Maryland at Collage Park and postdoctoral studies in Biostatistics through her participation in the Biomarkers in Transplantation (BiT) initiative, hosted by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She then joined the PROOF Centre of Excellence where she led the statistical analysis of proteomics data. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia and a Canada Research Chair-II in Statistical Genomics. Her research interests are in robust estimation and regularization of linear models with applications to Statistical Genomics and Proteomics.