David Wolpert

SFI News:

The Santa Fe Institute presents a free seminar titled Statistical Inference: The Hidden World within Science.

David Wolpert of Los Alamos National Laboratory is an SFI External Professor and will present the seminar at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, June 20 in the Noyce Conference Room at SFI, 1399 Hyde Park Road in Santa Fe.

Statistical inference — machine learning — is central to science in that it is the foundation of data analysis. Wolpert argues that its relationship with science is both far broader and far deeper.

He illustrates this breadth by showing how it can be applied to many numerical methods that lie at the heart of science, e.g., genetic algorithms and Monte Carlo methods. 

Wolpert illustrates that some of the deepest issues in science, like the legitimacy of building models, are intrinsically issues in (Bayesian) statistics, and that how we do that statistics can have huge practical implications.

For more information, visit http://www.santafe.edu