Peter McCullagh : Some remarks on the use of trees in statistical models

Posted by Weiya Zhang , part of the Statistics and Data Science Seminar.

At

Sept. 20, 2006, 3:30 p.m.

In

SEO 636

Abstract

Trees arise naturally in the study of the evolution of a population. Branching processes are the natural tool in the forward direction, and coalescent processes are natural for the study of ancestral relationships or lineages in reverse time. A tree has a natural graphical representation, but for some purposes a matrix representation is also useful. In statistical work, a similarity matrix is a covariance matrix generated by additive common factors with independent components. The set of similarity matrices also coincides with the set of fragmentation trees. Some issues arising in the use of structured covariance matrices of this sort will be discussed.

Tea will begin at 3:15pm.