Il Prof. A. Smith dell'universita' di Ottawa terra' tre lezioni nell'ambito
del dottorato in matematica presso il Dip. di Matematica e Fisica di Roma
Tre con il seguente programma:
*MIXING OF MARKOV CHAINS ON MANIFOLDS*
Martedi 6 Dicembre ore 11:00-13:00 aula 311
*Mixing Properties of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo*
Abstract:* Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and its variants are extremely
popular Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms in statistical computing. In
practice, they seem to outperform classical algorithms such as the Gibbs
sampler and the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Unfortunately, the
characteristic long moves made by HMC also make it difficult to analyze. I
will survey some existing results on HMC and competitor algorithms,
including some recent results of myself and Mangoubi, and present open
problems.*
Mercoledi 7 Dicembre ore 14:30-16:30 aula 311
*Convex Sets, Conductance and Curvature.*
Abstract: Geometric random walks are popular tools for sampling from the
interior or boundary of convex sets. I will introduce some popular
geometric random walks and describe the mathematical techniques developed
by Dieker, Kannan, Lovasz, Vempala and others to analyze them. I will then
describe how some recent work takes advantage of ideas from geometry and
convex optimization to propose and analyze algorithms that can have
improved performance.
Martedi 13 Dicembre ore 11:00-13:00 aula 311
*Kac's Walks and Couplings.*
Abstract: Kac's walks on the sphere and on the special orthogonal group.
introduced in 1953 and 1970, have long histories in the statistical physics
and computational statistics literatures. I will describe the history of
these walks and review some of the many results on the mixing properties of
these processes. I then present some recent work of myself and Pillai,
which uses connections to random matrix theory to obtain substantially
improved bounds on the mixing times of these two walks.
--
Fabio Martinelli
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Roma Tre University
Lg. San Murialdo 1, 00146 Roma Italy
tel +39 06 57338039 <+39%2006%205733%208039>
fax +39 06 57338039 <+39%2006%205733%208039>