Flexible and Adaptive Statistical Modeling

在过去的10-15年中，在应用回归和分类领域有了重大的发展。很多动力最初来自统计领域之外，比如计算机科学、机器学习和神经网络。在某些情况下，统计学家帮助综合这些创新，通常是从标准统计模型的角度重新解释它们。因此，我们现在拥有了一套非常强大的自适应回归和分类技术。这些现在被应用于医学诊断、生物信息学和遗传建模、化学过程控制、形状、手写、语音和面部识别、金融建模以及其他广泛的重要实际问题。在本提案中，研究者开发了新的自适应回归和分类方法，特别是应用于生物信息学和基因组学问题。其中一种方法是“融合套索”，这是一种寻求既稀疏又光滑的解决方案的技术。它是为特征具有自然顺序的问题而设计的，例如在时间或空间上。蛋白质质谱就是这样一个应用领域。在这项研究中，研究者开发了新的统计算法来分析来自生物和人体实验的数据。这项工作是“生物信息学”蓬勃发展领域的一部分，该领域旨在理解生物学和医学新技术产生的大量数据。这类工作代表了人类基因组测序之后的下一步，并且在疾病预防和治疗方面具有巨大的社会影响潜力。

In the past 10-15 years there have been significant developments in theareas of applied regression and classification. Much of the impetusoriginally came from outside of the field of statistics, from areassuch as computer science, machine learning and neural networks. In somecases, statisticians have helped to synthesize these innovations, often byreinterpreting them from the point of view of standard statistical models.As a result, we now have at our disposal a very powerful collection oftechniques for adaptive regression and classification. These are nowbeing applied to medical diagnosis, bioinformatics and genetic modeling,chemical process control, shape, handwriting, speech and face recognition,financial modeling, and a wide range of other important practicalproblems. In this proposal, the investigator develops new methods for adaptive regression and classification, with particular applicationto problems in bioinformatics and genomics. One such method is the"fused lasso", a technique which seeks solutions which are both sparseand and smooth. It is designed for problems in which the features havea natural ordering, e.g. in time or space. Protein mass spectometryrepresents one such area of application.In this research, the investigator develops new statistical algorithmsfor analyzing data from biological and human experiments. This workis part of the exploding field of "bioinformatics", which seeks to makesense of the huge volume of data produced by new technologies in biologyand medicine. This kind of work represents the next step after thesequencing of the human genome, and has enormous potential for societalimpact through disease prevention and treatment.