SDS Seminar Series – Dr. Dave Zhao

The Fall 2023 SDS Seminar Series continues on December 1st from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. with Dr. Dave Zhao (Department of Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). This event is in-person.    

Title: High-Dimensional Nonparametric Empirical Bayes Problems in Genomics

Abstract: Many problems in genomic biology require simultaneous estimation and/or inference for a large number of genomic features. These problems are amenable to empirical Bayes approaches, which share information across the features. Nonparametric empirical Bayes methods are especially useful because they can automatically identify the optimal way to share that information in a given dataset. However, when the parameters of interest are of moderate or high dimension, nonparametric methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality and become extremely inaccurate. There are few practical solutions. This talk will introduce some motivating genomics problems, from the fields of metabolomics and spatial transcriptomics, and will then explore new strategies for overcoming dimensionality.