Past Probability Seminars Spring 2020: Difference between revisions

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== Fall 2013 ==
= Spring 2020 =


<b>Thursdays in 901 Van Vleck Hall at 2:30 PM</b>, unless otherwise noted.
<b>We  usually end for questions at 3:20 PM.</b>


Thursdays in 901 Van Vleck Hall at 2:25 PM, unless otherwise noted.  
If you would like to sign up for the email list to receive seminar announcements then please send an email to
[mailto:join-probsem@lists.wisc.edu join-probsem@lists.wisc.edu]


<b>
Visit [https://mailman.cae.wisc.edu/listinfo/apseminar this page] to sign up for the email list to receive seminar announcements.</b>
== January 23, 2020, [https://www.math.wisc.edu/~seppalai/ Timo Seppalainen] (UW Madison) ==
'''Non-existence of bi-infinite geodesics in the exponential corner growth model
'''


= =
Whether bi-infinite geodesics exist has been a significant open problem in first- and last-passage percolation since the mid-80s.  A non-existence proof  in the case of directed planar last-passage percolation with exponential weights was posted by Basu, Hoffman and Sly in  November 2018. Their proof utilizes estimates from integrable probability.    This talk describes an independent proof completed 10 months later that relies on couplings, coarse graining, and control of geodesics through planarity and increment-stationary last-passage percolation. Joint work with Marton Balazs and Ofer Busani (Bristol).


== Thursday, September 12, Tom Kurtz, UW-Madison ==
== January 30, 2020, [https://www.math.wisc.edu/people/vv-prof-directory Scott Smith] (UW Madison) ==
'''Quasi-linear parabolic equations with singular forcing'''


Title: <b> Particle representations for SPDEs with boundary conditions </b>
The classical solution theory for stochastic ODE's is centered around Ito's stochastic integral.  By intertwining ideas from analysis and probability, this approach extends to many PDE's, a canonical example being multiplicative stochastic heat equations driven by space-time white noise.  In both the ODE and PDE settings, the solution theory is beyond the scope of classical deterministic theory because of the ambiguity in multiplying a function with a white noise.  The theory of rough paths and regularity structures provides a more quantitative understanding of this difficulty, leading to a more refined solution theory which efficiently divides the analytic and probabilistic aspects of the problem, and remarkably, even has an algebraic component.


Abstract: Stochastic partial differential equations frequently arise as limits of finite systems of weighted interacting particles. For a variety of purposes, it is useful to keep the particles in the limit obtaining an infinite exchangeable system of stochastic differential equations for the particle locations and weights. The corresponding de Finetti measure then gives the solution of the SPDE. These representations frequently simplify existence, uniqueness and convergence results. Following some discussion of general approaches to SPDEs, the talk will focus on situations where the particle locations are given by an iid family of diffusion processes, and the weights are chosen to obtain a nonlinear driving term and to match given boundary conditions for the SPDE. (Recent results are joint work with Dan Crisan.)
In this talk, we will discuss a new application of these ideas to stochastic heat equations where the strength of the diffusion is not constant but random, as it depends locally on the solution. These are known as quasi-linear equations. Our main result yields the deterministic side of a solution theory for these PDE's, modulo a suitable renormalization.  Along the way, we identify a formally infinite series expansion of the solution which guides our analysis, reveals a nice algebraic structure, and encodes the counter-terms in the PDE. This is joint work with Felix Otto, Jonas Sauer, and Hendrik Weber.


== Thursday, September 26, David F. Anderson, UW-Madison ==
== February 6, 2020, [https://sites.google.com/site/cyleeken/ Cheuk-Yin Lee] (Michigan State) ==
'''Sample path properties of stochastic partial differential equations: modulus of continuity and multiple points'''


Title:  Stochastic analysis of biochemical reaction networks with absolute concentration robustness
In this talk, we will discuss sample path properties of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). We will present a sharp regularity result for the stochastic wave equation driven by an additive Gaussian noise that is white in time and colored in space. We prove the exact modulus of continuity via the property of local nondeterminism. We will also discuss the existence problem for multiple points (or self-intersections) of the sample paths of SPDEs. Our result shows that multiple points do not exist in the critical dimension for a large class of Gaussian random fields including the solution of a linear system of stochastic heat or wave equations.


Abstract:  It has recently been shown that structural conditions on the reaction network, rather than a 'fine-tuning' of system parameters, often suffice to impart "absolute concentration robustness" on a wide class of biologically relevant, deterministically modeled mass-action systems [Shinar and Feinberg, Science, 2010]. Many biochemical networks, however, operate on a scale insufficient to justify the assumptions of the deterministic mass-action model, which raises the question of whether the long-term dynamics of the systems are being accurately captured when the deterministic model predicts stability. I will discuss recent results  that  show  that fundamentally different conclusions about the long-term behavior of such systems are reached if the systems are instead modeled with stochastic dynamics and a discrete state space. Specifically we characterize a large class of models which exhibit convergence to a positive robust equilibrium in the deterministic setting, whereas trajectories of the corresponding stochastic models are necessarily absorbed by a set of states that reside on the boundary of the state space.  The results are proved with a combination of methods from stochastic processes and chemical reaction network theory.
== February 13, 2020, [http://www.jelena-diakonikolas.com/ Jelena Diakonikolas] (UW Madison) ==
'''Langevin Monte Carlo Without Smoothness'''


== Thursday, October 3, Lam Si Tung Ho, UW-Madison ==
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is understood mainly in the setting of smooth (gradient-Lipschitz) log-densities, a serious limitation for applications in machine learning. We remove this limitation by providing polynomial-time convergence guarantees for a variant of LMC in the setting of non-smooth log-concave distributions. At a high level, our results follow by leveraging the implicit smoothing of the log-density that comes from a small Gaussian perturbation that we add to the iterates of the algorithm and while controlling the bias and variance that are induced by this perturbation.
Based on joint work with Niladri Chatterji, Michael I. Jordan, and Peter L. Bartlett.


Title: Asymptotic theory of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck tree models
== February 20, 2020, [https://math.berkeley.edu/~pmwood/ Philip Matchett Wood] (UC Berkeley) ==
'''A replacement principle for perturbations of non-normal matrices'''


Abstract: Tree models arise in evolutionary biology when sampling biological species, which are related to each other according to a phylogenetic tree. When observations are modeled using an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process along the tree, the autocorrelation between two tips decreases exponentially with their tree distance. Under these models, tips represent biological species and the OU process parameters represent the strength and direction of natural selection. For the mean, we show that if the heights of the trees are bounded, then it is not microergodic: no estimator can ever be consistent for this parameter. On the other hand, if the heights of the trees converge to infinity, then the MLE of the mean is consistent and we establish a phase transition on the behavior of its variance. For covariance parameters, we give a general sufficient condition ensuring microergodicity. We also provide a <math>\sqrt{n}</math>-consistent estimators for them under some mild conditions.
There are certain non-normal matrices whose eigenvalues can change dramatically when a small perturbation is added. However, when that perturbation is an iid random matrix, it appears that the eigenvalues become stable after perturbation and only change slightly when further small perturbations are added. Much of the work is this situation has focused on iid random gaussian perturbations. In this talk, we will discuss work on a universality result that allows for consideration of non-gaussian perturbations, and that shows that all perturbations satisfying certain conditions will produce the same limiting eigenvalue measure. Interestingly, this even allows for deterministic perturbations to be considered. Joint work with Sean O'Rourke.


== Thursday, October 10, <span style="color:red">NO SEMINAR </span>==
== February 27, 2020, No seminar ==
''' '''


[http://www.math.northwestern.edu/mwp/ Midwest Probability Colloquium]
== March 5, 2020, [https://www.ias.edu/scholars/jiaoyang-huang Jiaoyang Huang] (IAS) ==
''' Large Deviation Principles via Spherical Integrals'''


== <span style="color:red">Tuesday, October 15, 4pm, Van Vleck B239,</span> [http://www.math.wisc.edu/distinguished-lectures Distinguished Lecture Series in Mathematics:] [http://math.mit.edu/people/profile.php?pid=1222 Alexei Borodin], MIT ==
In this talk, I'll explain a framework to study the large deviation principle for matrix models and their quantized versions, by tilting the measures using the asymptotics of spherical integrals obtained by Guionnet and Zeitouni. As examples, we obtain


Please note the non-standard time and day.
1) the large deviation principle for the empirical distribution of the diagonal entries of $UB_NU^*$, for a sequence of $N\times N$ diagonal matrices $B_N$ and unitary/orthogonal Haar distributed matrices $U$;


Title: '''Integrable Probability I'''
2) the large deviation upper bound for the empirical eigenvalue distribution of $A_N+UB_NU^*$, for two sequences of $N\times N$ diagonal matrices $A_N, B_N$, and their complementary lower bounds at "good" probability distributions;


Abstract: The goal of the talks is to describe the emerging field of integrable
3) the large deviation principle for the Kostka number $K_{\lambda_N \eta_N}$, for two sequences of partitions $\lambda_N, \eta_N$ with at most $N$ rows;
probability, whose goal is to identify and analyze exactly solvable
probabilistic models. The models and results are often easy to describe,
yet difficult to find, and they carry essential information about broad
universality classes of stochastic processes.


== <span style="color:red">Wednesday October 16, 2:30pm, Van Vleck B139,</span> [http://www.math.wisc.edu/distinguished-lectures Distinguished Lecture Series in Mathematics:] [http://math.mit.edu/people/profile.php?pid=1222 Alexei Borodin], MIT ==
4) the large deviation upper bound for the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients $c_{\lambda_N \eta_N}^{\kappa_N}$, for three sequences of partitions $\lambda_N, \eta_N, \kappa_N$ with at most $N$ rows, and their complementary lower bounds at "good" probability distributions.


This is a joint work with Belinschi and Guionnet.


Please note the non-standard time and day.
== March 12, 2020, No seminar ==
''' '''


Title: '''Integrable Probability II'''
== March 19, 2020, Spring break ==
''' '''


Abstract: The goal of the talks is to describe the emerging field of integrable
== March 26, 2020, CANCELLED, [https://math.cornell.edu/philippe-sosoe Philippe Sosoe] (Cornell) ==
probability, whose goal is to identify and analyze exactly solvable
''' '''
probabilistic models. The models and results are often easy to describe,
yet difficult to find, and they carry essential information about broad
universality classes of stochastic processes.


== <span style="color:red"> Tuesday, October 22, 4pm, Van Vleck 901</span>, Anton Wakolbinger, Goethe Universität Frankfurt ==
== April 2, 2020, CANCELLED, [http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~tl/ Tianyu Liu] (UW Madison)==
''' '''


Please note the non-standard time and day, <b><span style="color:red">and the recently revised time and room</span>.</b>
== April 9, 2020, CANCELLED, [http://stanford.edu/~ajdunl2/ Alexander Dunlap] (Stanford) ==
''' '''


Title: '''The time to fixation of a strongly beneficial mutant in a structured population'''
== April 16, 2020, CANCELLED, [https://statistics.wharton.upenn.edu/profile/dingjian/ Jian Ding] (University of Pennsylvania) ==
''' '''


Abstract:
== April 22-24, 2020, CANCELLED, [http://frg.int-prob.org/ FRG Integrable Probability] meeting ==
We discuss a system that describes the evolution of the vector of relative frequencies of a beneficial allele in d colonies, starting in (0,...,0) and ending in (1,...,1). Its diffusion part consists of Wright-Fisher noises in all the components that model the random reproduction, its drift part consists of a linear interaction term coming from the gene flow between the colonies, together with a logistic growth term due to the selective advantage of the allele, and a term which makes the entrance from (0,...,0) possible. It turns out that there are d extremal ones among the solutions of the system, each of them corresponding to one colony in which the beneficial mutant originally appears. We then focus on the fixation time in the limit of a large selection coefficient, and explain how its asymptotic distribution can be analysed in terms of the so called ancestral selection graph.  This is joint work with Andreas Greven, Peter Pfaffelhuber and Cornelia Pokalyuk.


== Thursday, October 24, Ke Wang, IMA  ==
3-day event in Van Vleck 911


Title: Random weighted projections, random quadratic forms and random eigenvectors
== April 23, 2020, CANCELLED, [http://www.hairer.org/ Martin Hairer] (Imperial College) ==


Abstract: We start with a simple, yet useful, concentration inequality concerning random
[https://www.math.wisc.edu/wiki/index.php/Colloquia Wolfgang Wasow Lecture] at 4pm in Van Vleck 911
weighted projections in high dimensional spaces. The inequality is used to prove a general concentration inequality for random quadratic forms. In another application, we show the infinity norm of most unit eigenvectors of Hermitian random matrices with bounded entries is <math>O(\sqrt{\log n/n})</math>. This is joint work with Van Vu.


== April 30, 2020, CANCELLED, [http://willperkins.org/ Will Perkins] (University of Illinois at Chicago) ==
''' '''


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== Thursday, November 7, TBA ==


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== Thursday, November 14, [http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~racz/ Miklos Z. Racz], UC Berkeley  ==
Title: '''Multidimensional sticky Brownian motions as limits of exclusion processes'''
Abstract: I will talk about exclusion processes in one dimension where particles interact in a sticky fashion. Specifically, whenever two or more particles occupy adjacent sites, they stick together for an extended period of time and the entire particle system is slowed down until the "collision" is resolved. We show that under diffusive scaling of space and time such processes converge to what one might refer to as a sticky reflected Brownian motion in the wedge. The latter behaves as a Brownian motion with constant drift vector and diffusion matrix in the interior of the wedge, and reflects at the boundary of the wedge after spending an instant of time there. In particular, this leads to a natural multidimensional generalization of sticky Brownian motion on the half-line, which is of interest in both queueing theory and stochastic portfolio theory. For instance, this can model a market, which experiences a slowdown due to a major event (such as a court trial between some of the largest firms in the market) deciding about the new market leader. This is joint work with Mykhaylo Shkolnikov.
== Thursday, November 21, [http://www.unc.edu/~budhiraj/ Amarjit Budhiraja], [http://math.unc.edu/ UNC-Chapel Hill] ==
Title: '''Infinity Laplacian and Stochastic Differential Games'''
Abstract:
A two-player zero-sum stochastic differential game(SDG), motivated by
a discrete time random turn game of Peres, Schramm,Sheffield and
Wilson(2006) known as the Tug of War, is introduced.  The SDG is
defined in terms of an m-dimensional state process that is driven by a
one-dimensional Brownian motion, played until the state exits the domain.
The players controls enter in a diffusion coefficient and in an
unbounded drift coefficient of the state process. We show that the game
has value, and characterize the value function as the unique viscosity
solution of  the inhomogeneous infinity Laplace equation introduced in
Peres et al. A similar SDG is conjectured for the motion by curvature
equation in the plane.  Joint work with R. Atar.
<!--
== Thursday, November 28, <span style="color:red">NO SEMINAR</span> ==
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Holiday]
-->
== Thursday, December 5, [http://www.math.wisc.edu/~shottovy/ Scott Hottovy], UW-Madison ==
Title: '''Small mass approximation for Brownian particles with applications to physical systems'''
Abstract:
In this talk a class of stochastic differential equations, from Newton's second law, is considered in the limit as mass tends to zero, called the Smoluchowski-Kramers limit. The Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation is useful in simplifying the dynamics of a system. For example, the problems of calculating of rates of chemical reactions, describing dynamics of  complex systems with noise, and measuring ultra small forces, are simplified using the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation. In this talk, I will give a limit theorem for
the small mass limit for a multi-dimensional system with arbitrary state-dependent
friction and noise coefficients, and show how it is applied to three different physical systems of interest: measuring micro forces of a Brownian particle in a diffusion gradient, movement of
particles in a temperature gradient, and a noisey circuit. The main result is proved using a theory of convergence of stochastic integrals developed by Kurtz and Protter.
== Thursday, December 12, [http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/staff/academic-research/zygouras/ Nikos Zygouras], University of Warwick ==
Title: '''Polynomial Chaos and scaling limits of disordered systems'''
Abstract: We will formulate general conditions ensuring that a sequence of
multi-linear polynomials of independent random variables
converges to a limiting random variable, given by
an explicit Wiener chaos expansion over the d-dimensional white noise.
A key ingredient in our approach is a Lindeberg principle for polynomial chaos expansions,
which extends earlier work of Mossel, O'Donnell and Oleszkiewicz.
These results provide a unified framework to study the
continuum and weak disorder scaling limits
of statistical mechanics systems that are disorder relevant, including
the disordered pinning model, the long-range directed polymer
model in dimension 1+1, (generalizing the work of Alberts, Khanin, Quastel),
and the two-dimensional random field Ising model.
Joint work with F. Caravenna and R.F. Sun






[[Past Seminars]]
[[Past Seminars]]

Latest revision as of 22:18, 12 August 2020


Spring 2020

Thursdays in 901 Van Vleck Hall at 2:30 PM, unless otherwise noted. We usually end for questions at 3:20 PM.

If you would like to sign up for the email list to receive seminar announcements then please send an email to join-probsem@lists.wisc.edu


January 23, 2020, Timo Seppalainen (UW Madison)

Non-existence of bi-infinite geodesics in the exponential corner growth model

Whether bi-infinite geodesics exist has been a significant open problem in first- and last-passage percolation since the mid-80s. A non-existence proof in the case of directed planar last-passage percolation with exponential weights was posted by Basu, Hoffman and Sly in November 2018. Their proof utilizes estimates from integrable probability. This talk describes an independent proof completed 10 months later that relies on couplings, coarse graining, and control of geodesics through planarity and increment-stationary last-passage percolation. Joint work with Marton Balazs and Ofer Busani (Bristol).

January 30, 2020, Scott Smith (UW Madison)

Quasi-linear parabolic equations with singular forcing

The classical solution theory for stochastic ODE's is centered around Ito's stochastic integral. By intertwining ideas from analysis and probability, this approach extends to many PDE's, a canonical example being multiplicative stochastic heat equations driven by space-time white noise. In both the ODE and PDE settings, the solution theory is beyond the scope of classical deterministic theory because of the ambiguity in multiplying a function with a white noise. The theory of rough paths and regularity structures provides a more quantitative understanding of this difficulty, leading to a more refined solution theory which efficiently divides the analytic and probabilistic aspects of the problem, and remarkably, even has an algebraic component.

In this talk, we will discuss a new application of these ideas to stochastic heat equations where the strength of the diffusion is not constant but random, as it depends locally on the solution. These are known as quasi-linear equations. Our main result yields the deterministic side of a solution theory for these PDE's, modulo a suitable renormalization. Along the way, we identify a formally infinite series expansion of the solution which guides our analysis, reveals a nice algebraic structure, and encodes the counter-terms in the PDE. This is joint work with Felix Otto, Jonas Sauer, and Hendrik Weber.

February 6, 2020, Cheuk-Yin Lee (Michigan State)

Sample path properties of stochastic partial differential equations: modulus of continuity and multiple points

In this talk, we will discuss sample path properties of stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). We will present a sharp regularity result for the stochastic wave equation driven by an additive Gaussian noise that is white in time and colored in space. We prove the exact modulus of continuity via the property of local nondeterminism. We will also discuss the existence problem for multiple points (or self-intersections) of the sample paths of SPDEs. Our result shows that multiple points do not exist in the critical dimension for a large class of Gaussian random fields including the solution of a linear system of stochastic heat or wave equations.

February 13, 2020, Jelena Diakonikolas (UW Madison)

Langevin Monte Carlo Without Smoothness

Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is understood mainly in the setting of smooth (gradient-Lipschitz) log-densities, a serious limitation for applications in machine learning. We remove this limitation by providing polynomial-time convergence guarantees for a variant of LMC in the setting of non-smooth log-concave distributions. At a high level, our results follow by leveraging the implicit smoothing of the log-density that comes from a small Gaussian perturbation that we add to the iterates of the algorithm and while controlling the bias and variance that are induced by this perturbation. Based on joint work with Niladri Chatterji, Michael I. Jordan, and Peter L. Bartlett.

February 20, 2020, Philip Matchett Wood (UC Berkeley)

A replacement principle for perturbations of non-normal matrices

There are certain non-normal matrices whose eigenvalues can change dramatically when a small perturbation is added. However, when that perturbation is an iid random matrix, it appears that the eigenvalues become stable after perturbation and only change slightly when further small perturbations are added. Much of the work is this situation has focused on iid random gaussian perturbations. In this talk, we will discuss work on a universality result that allows for consideration of non-gaussian perturbations, and that shows that all perturbations satisfying certain conditions will produce the same limiting eigenvalue measure. Interestingly, this even allows for deterministic perturbations to be considered. Joint work with Sean O'Rourke.

February 27, 2020, No seminar

March 5, 2020, Jiaoyang Huang (IAS)

Large Deviation Principles via Spherical Integrals

In this talk, I'll explain a framework to study the large deviation principle for matrix models and their quantized versions, by tilting the measures using the asymptotics of spherical integrals obtained by Guionnet and Zeitouni. As examples, we obtain

1) the large deviation principle for the empirical distribution of the diagonal entries of $UB_NU^*$, for a sequence of $N\times N$ diagonal matrices $B_N$ and unitary/orthogonal Haar distributed matrices $U$;

2) the large deviation upper bound for the empirical eigenvalue distribution of $A_N+UB_NU^*$, for two sequences of $N\times N$ diagonal matrices $A_N, B_N$, and their complementary lower bounds at "good" probability distributions;

3) the large deviation principle for the Kostka number $K_{\lambda_N \eta_N}$, for two sequences of partitions $\lambda_N, \eta_N$ with at most $N$ rows;

4) the large deviation upper bound for the Littlewood-Richardson coefficients $c_{\lambda_N \eta_N}^{\kappa_N}$, for three sequences of partitions $\lambda_N, \eta_N, \kappa_N$ with at most $N$ rows, and their complementary lower bounds at "good" probability distributions.

This is a joint work with Belinschi and Guionnet.

March 12, 2020, No seminar

March 19, 2020, Spring break

March 26, 2020, CANCELLED, Philippe Sosoe (Cornell)

April 2, 2020, CANCELLED, Tianyu Liu (UW Madison)

April 9, 2020, CANCELLED, Alexander Dunlap (Stanford)

April 16, 2020, CANCELLED, Jian Ding (University of Pennsylvania)

April 22-24, 2020, CANCELLED, FRG Integrable Probability meeting

3-day event in Van Vleck 911

April 23, 2020, CANCELLED, Martin Hairer (Imperial College)

Wolfgang Wasow Lecture at 4pm in Van Vleck 911

April 30, 2020, CANCELLED, Will Perkins (University of Illinois at Chicago)





Past Seminars