| Talk title | Tree-based Methods and Applications |
| Speaker | Prof. Heping ZHANG Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Statistics and Child Study at Yale University |
| Date & Time | 19 June 2017 (Monday) 10:00-11:00 |
| Venue | Room G004, E12 Building (University of Macau) |
| Biosketch | Prof. Zhang published over 260 research articles and monographs in theory and applications of statistical methods and in several areas of biomedical research including epidemiology, genetics, child and women health, mental health, substance use, and reproductive medicine. He directed a training program in mental health research that was funded by the NIMH. He directs the Collaborative Center for Statistics in Science that coordinates the Reproductive Medicine Network to evaluate treatment effectiveness for infertility. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was named the 2008 Myrto Lefokopoulou distinguished lecturer by Harvard School of Public Health and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. In 2011, he received the Royan International Award on Reproductive Health. |
| Abstract |
Many scientific problems reduce to modeling the relationship between two sets of variables. Regression methodology is designed to quantify these relationships. More often than not, we do not know enough about the relationships, and hence nonparametric classification and regression methods are particularly useful, such as tree-based methods as I will present in this seminar. The basic idea is to divide the potential heterogeneous domain of the observed data into more homogeneous sub-regions so that the relationship between the two sets of variables can be easily characterized within each sub-region. I will use real examples to explain how to identify those sub-regions and how to interpret the trees. |
