2017 Winter

Date: 2017-01-20 Time: 15:30-16:30 Location: BURN 1205 Abstract: Finite mixture models provide a natural framework for analyzing data from heterogeneous populations. In practice, however, the number of hidden subpopulations in the data may be unknown. The problem of estimating the order of a mixture model, namely the number of subpopulations, is thus crucial for many applications. In this talk, we present a new penalized likelihood solution to this problem, which is applicable to models with a multidimensional parameter space.

Date: 2017-01-13 Time: 15:30-16:30 Location: BURN 1205 Abstract: Many popular statistical models for network valued datasets fall under the remit of the graphon framework, which (implicitly) assumes the networks are densely connected. However, this assumption rarely holds for the real-world networks of practical interest. We introduce a new class of models for random graphs that generalises the dense graphon models to the sparse graph regime, and we argue that this meets many of the desiderata one would demand of a model to serve as the foundation for a statistical analysis of real-world networks.