CSI 991

Recent articles in computational learning and computational statistics

Fridays 3:00pm -- 5:00pm
Planetary Hall 126

CSI 991 Section 004

Contact:
jgentle@gmu.edu

The seminar will be conducted in the form of a journal club.

The objective is three-fold:

• to be exposed to summaries of a sampling of the recent literature,
• to work carefully through two examples of recent research, possibly in the area in which the student will do dissertation research.
• to gain experience in making a research presentation.

Students who are enrolled in the class will be required to make two 30-to-45-minute presentations, each summarizing a recent article in computational learning or computational statistics. ("Recent" means 2005 or later.)

A brief written report is also required. This can be in the form of straight text (5 or 6 pages) or a copy of the presentation slides.

The presentations can be simple summaries, or, preferably, critical reviews citing other work or possible approaches. Monte Carlo studies or applications on sample datasets would be nice.

Make sure that work that is supposed to be yours is indeed your own.

Schedule

• August 29
  Organization and plans.

  Find online articles at http://library.gmu.edu/
  Click on "E-Journals" and then enter keyword such as
  "machine learning", "statistical learning", "computational statistics", etc. or else enter the name of a specific journal.
  
  Assignment 1; due September 5: Select an article for your first presentation. Email bibliographic info (author, year, title, journal/proceedings name, page numbers) to instructor.
  

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• September 19
  Presentation by William Ampeh.
  Veronica J. Berrocal, Adrian E. Raftery, Tilmann Gneiting and Richard C. Steed (2010), Probabilistic Weather Forecasting for Winter Road Maintenance, Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 105, 522--537.
  
  Presentation by Benjamin Hess.
  Gottron, Thomas, and Nedim Lipka (2010), A Comparison of Language Identification Approaches on Short, Query-Style Texts, Advances in Information Retrieval, (Proceedings 32nd European Conference on IR Research, edited by C. Gurrin, Y. He, G. Kazai, G., U. Kruschwitz, S. Little, Th. Roelleke, S. Rüger, and K. van Rijsbergen). Springer, 611--614.
  

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• September 26
  Presentation by John Husdale.
  Liu, Lan, and Michael G. Hudgens (2014), Large Sample Randomization Inference of Causal Effects in the Presence of Interference, Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 109, 288--301.
  
  Presentation by John Leung.
  Agarwal, Alekh, Oliveier Chapelle, Miroslav Dudík, and John Langford (2014) A Reliable Effective Terascale Linear Learning System Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 15, 1111--1133.
  
  Assignment 2; due October 3: Select an article for your second presentation. Email bibliographic info (author, year, title, journal/proceedings name, page numbers) to instructor.
  

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• October 17
  
  Presentation by William Ampeh.
  Eugene Finka and Harith Suman Gandhia (2011), Compression of Time Series by Extracting Major Extrema, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, vol. 23, 255--270.
  DOI:10.1080/0952813X.2010.505800

  Presentation by Benjamin Hess.
  Edward J. Wegman and David J. Marchette (2003), On Some Techniques for Streaming Data: A Case Study of Internet Packet Headers, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics}, vol. 12, pages?.
  

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• October 24 No seminar
  

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• October 31 Halloween
  Presentation by John Husdale.
  Faming Liang, Yichen Cheng and Guang Lin (2014), Simulated Stochastic Approximation Annealing for Global Optimization With a Square-Root Cooling Schedule, Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 109, 847--863.
  DOI:10.1080/01621459.2013.872993

  Presentation by John Leung.
  Follow-up presentation, including Hadoop demo.