Ohio State is in the process of revising websites and program materials to accurately reflect compliance with the law. While this work occurs, language referencing protected class status or other activities prohibited by Ohio Senate Bill 1 may still appear in some places. However, all programs and activities are being administered in compliance with federal and state law.

Seminar: Radu Herbei - Exact Inference in Functional Regression: Estimating Hydrological Controls on Ecosystem Dynamics in an Antarctic Lake

Photo of Radu Herbei
November 19, 2019
10:40 am - 11:35 am
MBI Auditorium, Jennings Hall 355

Radu Herbei

Department of Statistics, The Ohio State University


Many of the modern-day statistical inference problems address the issue of estimating an infinite dimensional parameter (a function or a surface). Given that one can only store a finite representation of these objects on a computer, the typical approach is to employ some dimension-reduction strategy and proceed with a statistical inference procedure in a multivariate setting. We introduce an exact inference procedure for functional parameters in a Bayesian regression setting. By "exact" we mean that the MCMC sampler used to explore the posterior distribution over the functional parameter is unaffected by the fact that only finite dimensional objects are used during the simulation procedure. We use techniques based on randomized acceptance probabilities and Bernoulli factories to ensure that the sampler targets the correct distribution.  We apply our method to the problem of estimating the association between stream discharge and physical, chemical, and biological processes within an Antarctic lake system.

This talk is free and open to the public.

Events Filters: