BASS: Berkeley Algebraic Statistics Seminar

Organizers: Andrew Critch and Shaowei Lin
Time: Wednesdays, 2-3pm
Location: 939 Evans

For the first half of the semester, the seminar will focus on two main sources:

• Algebraic Statistics for Computational Biology, Pachter, Sturmfels (2005)
• Lectures on Algebraic Statistics [electronic version], Drton, Sturmfels, Sullivant (2008)

• Causality: Models, Reading, and Inference, 2nd Edition, Pearl (2009)

Date	Speaker	Institution	Title, linked to announcement
Aug 17	Shaowei Lin	UC Berkeley	Sparse Coding and Why it Works, and organizational meeting
Aug 31 [slides]	Andrew Critch	UC Berkeley	What Causality Is (stats for mathematicians)
Sep 7	Damien Mondragon	UC Berkeley	Implicitization and tropical geometry (math for statisticians)
Sep 14	Jose Rodriguez	UC Berkeley	Markov bases for toric models
Sep 21	Ngoc Tran	UC Berkeley	Combinatorial types of tropical eigenvectors with applications to ranking
Sep 28	Andrew Critch	UC Berkeley	How to find a hidden Markov process
Oct 5	[no seminar]		SIAM conference on applied algebraic geometry this week
Oct 12	Qingchun Ren	UC Berkeley	The neighbor-net algorithm and point configurations in P1
Oct 19	Shaowei Lin	UC Berkeley	Bayesian Statistics and Singular Learning Theory
Oct 26 [summary]	Rudolf Kalman	Swiss Federal IT	A new direction of research in mathematical systems theory: Algebraic analysis, identication, and synthesis of passive electric networks
Nov 2	Piotr Zwiernik	IPAM	Why do we care about inequalities in (algebraic) statistics?
Nov 9	Luke Oeding	UC Berkeley	Tensors and Implicitization
Nov 16	Kelli Talaska	UC Berkeley	Trek Systems and Gaussian Graphical Models
Nov 23	[no seminar]		Thanksgiving
Nov 30	Bernd Sturmfels	UC Berkeley	Geometry of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine
Dec 7	Guido Montufar	Max Planck, Leipzig	Submodels of Deep Belief Networks