Bill Press of “Numerical Recipes in C” speaking at PICASso today.

From: picasso-bounces@lists.cs.princeton.edu [mailto:picasso-bounces@lists.cs.princeton.edu] On Behalf Of Cecile Huttenhower
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2008 9:12 AM
To: picasso-faculty@lists.cs.princeton.edu; picasso@lists.cs.princeton.edu
Subject: [PICASso] TODAY - What Is a Statistical Model and When Do I Need One?

** PICASso:

** Program in Integrative Information, Computer and Application Sciences

** www.cs.princeton.edu/picasso

** TALK TODAY -- Monday, November 24, 2008

Interdisciplinary Computational Seminars

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/picasso/computational_lunch.php

TITLE: What Is a Statistical Model and When Do I Need One?

SPEAKER: Bill Press, CS, U. Texas

TIME: Monday, November 24, 2008

Seminar begins at 12:30 p.m. (lunch provided ~12:20)

LOCATION: Room 104, Computer Science, Princeton University

ABSTRACT:

Whether by differential equations (ODEs or PDEs) or algebraic systems of equations, computational science traffics mainly in deterministic models of physical systems. While we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the model "is" the physical system, it is always only an abstract, and approximate, representation. Statistical models are a different kind of abstraction, not for the deterministic part of a system, but for how it interacts with physical stochasticity and/or with Bayesian priors expressing imperfect knowledge. This talk compares statistical and deterministic models, using examples drawn from cosmology and bioinformatics.

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