STA 290 Seminar Series
Thursday, March 5th 2015, 4:10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments at 3:30pm in MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)
Speaker: Alexander Bouchard-Côtè (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)
Title: Realistic evolutionary models and efficient Monte Carlo methods
Abstract: Scientific investigation of biological evolution and language change is increasingly assisted by statistical models and efficient algorithms. I will talk about some recent work, where we used and developed new Monte Carlo methods to build more realistic models of evolution and language change, and to efficiently do inference on these models. I will provide some background on phylogenetics and Sequential Monte Carlo along the way.