Young mathematicians exchange about data science

From 7 to 11 December 2020, more than 60 doctoral candidates from universities around the world attended the online winter school on mathematical statistics organised by the University of Luxembourg in the frame of the ERA Chair in Mathematical Statistics and Data Science “SanDAL”.

The winter school was introduced by Prof. Yannick Baraud, ERA Chair Holder at the University of Luxembourg, who presented the European project: “Initiated in 2019, SanDAL aims to develop a high-level research group in mathematical statistics and data science at the University of Luxembourg. On this occasion, we decided to organise a winter school for young researchers to learn about recent developments in mathematical statistics directly from leaders in their respective fields.”

During the week, three internationally renowned professors shared their knowledge and experience with young researchers. Cristina Butucea, Professor of Statistics at CREST, ENSAE, IP PARIS focused on non-parametric inference under local differential privacy; Karim Loucini, Professor at CMAP-Ecole Polytechnique presented some recent results and applications of principal component analysis and  Stéphane Robin, Senior Researcher at AgroParisTech/INRA showed statistical inference of incomplete data models to analyse ecological networks.

In addition, nine doctoral candidates had the opportunity to give talks about their current research activities and exchange about future developments: “Automatic design of neural networks with Gaussian Processes” by Ayman Makki ; “Reinforcement Learning Enhanced Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network” by Zhiqiang Zhong; “p-Estimation in Mixture Models” by Alexandre Lecestre; “Diffusivity Estimation for Activator-Inhibitor Models – Theory and Application to Intracellular Dynamics of the Actin Cytoskeleton” by Gregor Pasemann ; “ Topological Measures for cancer drug sensitivity prediction and repositioning” by Apurva Badkas; “ Robust estimation of a regression function in exponential families” by Juntong Chen; “Exact variation for stochastic heat equation with piecewise constant coefficients and application to parameter estimation” by Eya Zougar; “NAV calculation errors and corrections of investment funds: definition and simulation to measure the statistical impact on the NAV time series” by Simon Petitjean and “Concentration inequalities on M-estimators for robust mean estimating” by Timothée Mathieu.

The winter school concluded with a presentation of the European funding opportunities for mathematicians and especially in the frame of the new Horizon Europe and the invitation to participate in the International Conference on Statistics and Related Fields (ICON STARF) which will take place from 12 to 16 July 2021.