Recent seminars


Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Dieter Mitsche, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
Tail bounds for detection times in dynamic hyperbolic graphs

Motivated by Krioukov et al.'s model of random hyperbolic graphs for real-world networks, and inspired by the analysis of a dynamic model of graphs in Euclidean space by Peres et al., we introduce a dynamic model of hyperbolic graphs in which vertices are allowed to move according to a Brownian motion maintaining the distribution of vertices in hyperbolic space invariant. For different parameters of the speed of angular and radial motion, we analyze tail bounds for detection times of a fixed target and obtain a complete picture, for very different regimes, of how and when the target is detected: as a function of the time passed, we characterize the subset of the hyperbolic space where particles typically detecting the target are initially located. We overcome several substantial technical difficulties not present in Euclidean space, and provide a complete picture on tail bounds. On the way, we obtain also new results for the time more general continuous processes with drift and reflecting barrier spent in certain regions, and we also obtain improved bounds for independent sums of Pareto random variables.

Joint work with Marcos Kiwi and Amitai Linker.


Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

João Pereira, Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada
Method of Moments: From Sample Complexity to Efficient Implicit Computations

The focus of this talk is the multivariate method of moments for parameter estimation. First from a theoretical standpoint, we show that in problems where the noise is high, the number of observations necessary to estimate parameters is dictated by the moments of the distribution. Second from a computational standpoint, we address the curse of dimensionality: the number of entries of higher-order moments of multivariate random variables scale exponentially with the order of the moments. For Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), we develop numerical methods forimplicit computations; with the empirical moment tensors. This reduces the computational and storage costs, and opens the door to the competitiveness of the method of moments as compared to expectation maximization methods. Time permitting, we connect these results to symmetric $C^P$ tensor decomposition and sketch a recent algorithm which is faster than the state-of-the-art and comes with guarantees.


Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Leandro Chiarini, Universidade de Utrecht
Stochastic homogenisation of Gaussian fields

In this talk, we discuss the convergence of a sequence of random fields that generalise the Gaussian Free Field and bi-Laplacian field. Such fields are defined in terms of non-homogeneous elliptic operators which will be sampled at random. Under standard assumptions of stochastic homogenisation, we identify the limit fields as the usual GFF and bi-Laplacian fields up to a multiplicative constant. This is a joint work with W. Ruszel.