Lectures & Presentations

Presenter: Dr. Xun Tang, Stanford University Description: This talk covers an efficient numerical approach for compressing a high-dimensional discrete distribution function into a non-negative tensor train (NTT) format. The two settings we consider are variational inference and density estimation, whereby one has access to either the unnormalized analytic formula of the distribution or the samples generated from the distribution. In particular, the compression is done through a two-stage approach. In the first stage, we use existing subroutines to encode the distribution function in a tensor train format. In the second stage, we use an NTT ansatz to fit the obtained […]

Presenter: Snigdha Panigrahi, Associate Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Michigan Description:Agglomerative hierarchical clustering is one of the most widely used approaches for exploring how observations in a dataset relate to each other. However, its greedy nature makes it highly sensitive to small perturbations in the data, often producing different clustering results and making it difficult to separate genuine structure from spurious patterns. In this talk, I will show how randomizing hierarchical clustering can be useful not just for measuring stability but also for designing valid hypothesis testing procedures based on the clustering results. We propose a simple randomization scheme […]