Description:

Department of Statistics 2020-2021 Seminar Series (joint with Biostatistics) - Spring 2021

“Perfect is the enemy of good: new shrinkage estimators for genomics”

Sihai Dave Zhao, Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract
Simultaneous estimation problems have a long history in statistics and have become especially common and important in genomics research: modern technologies can simultaneously assay tens of thousands to even millions of genomic features that can each introduce an unknown parameter of interest. These applications reveal some conceptual and methodological gaps in the standard empirical Bayes approach to simultaneous estimation. This talk reviews some standard approaches, illustrates some difficulties, introduces an alternative approach based on regression modeling, and illustrates some new estimators that can be applied to gene expression denoising, coexpression network reconstruction, and large-scale gene expression imputation.