Statistical Analysis of Big Data: A Few Problems and Challenges

Abstract

The explosive growth of Big Data brings significant challenges and potentials to a wide range of fields, from genomics to personalized medicine to information technology. It also creates tremendous opportunities for statistics. The emergence of data science promises to revolutionize industries from business to health care to government, and to change how we work, live and communicate. In this lecture, the speaker will discuss a few interesting problems to illustrate the potential benefits of Big Data and the demand for statistics in the age of Big Data. The emergence of data science requires substantial expansion of statistics programs in leading universities.

About the speaker

Prof. T. Tony Cai received his PhD from Cornell University in 1996. He joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and is the currently the Dorothy Silberberg Professor and Professor of Statistics. He was also named the Medallion Lecturer at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2009.

Prof. Cai’s research interests include high-dimensional inference, large-scale multiple testing, nonparametric function estimation, functional data analysis, inference for discrete distributions, and statistical decision theory, with applications to compressed sensing, chemical identification, medical imaging and microarray data analysis.

Prof. Cai received the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Presidents' Award in 2008. He was also elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 2006.