Current Programs

SAMSI’s research programs are large-scale efforts focusing on interfaces among statistics, applied mathematics and other disciplinary sciences.  They involve long and short term research fellows from U.S. and international institutions, and SAMSI postdoctoral fellows. Graduate students from our partner universities and from other universities, both national and international, are active participants. The programs also engage researchers working in industry, governmental agencies and national laboratories.

Current Programs (2020-2021)

1) Program on Numerical Analysis in Data Science

  • Novel and efficient numerical techniques are undeniably needed to process and interpret massive data sets generated by modern technological and scientific developments; e.g., surveillance, space observation, medical data. Three overlapping themes in emerging numerical methods for this program are: (i) analysis of deep learning (DL) techniques; (ii) finding underlying dynamics of time-dependent data sets; (iii) Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (RandNLA) algorithms.

2)  Program on Combinatorial Probability

  • Placing a probability distribution over rankings and decomposition of rankings is also a probability model with combinatorial parameters, and can be used to extend classically deterministic optimization-based methods to stochastic models. Partition parameters arise in modeling gerrymandering in voting districts, where one is interested in distributions of demographic, political affiliation, and social affiliation variables conditional on the partition. Topological data analysis will be part of this program.

3) Program on Data Science in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

  • This program will address topics in computational social science, including social networks, machine learning, simulation methods, and other innovative data analysis procedures suitable for the complexity of such data.

Past Research Programs