LANS Informal Seminar: Eric Chi

Seminar Title: Convex Biclustering
Speaker: Eric Chi, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, North Carolina State University

Date/Time: 2016-08-03 10:30
Location: Bldg 240 rm 1404-1405

Description:
In the biclustering problem, we seek to simultaneously group observations and features. We present a convex formulation of the biclustering problem that possesses a unique global minimizer and an iterative algorithm, COBRA, that is guaranteed to identify it. The key contributions of our work are its simplicity, interpretability, and algorithmic guarantees. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach, which includes stably and reproducibly identifying biclusterings, on simulated and real bioinformatics gene expression data.

Eric is an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University. He earned his PhD in statistics at Rice University, where his graduate studies were funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Prior to joining NC State, he was a postdoc in the Human Genetics department at UCLA and then a postdoc in the Digital Signal Processing group at Rice University. His research interests are in statistical machine learning and numerical optimization and their application to analyzing large and complicated modern data in biological science and engineering applications.