IST Lunch Bunch

In modern data analysis, one is frequently faced with statistical inference problems involving massive datasets. Processing such large datasets is usually viewed as a substantial computational challenge. However, if data are a statistician's main resource then access to more data should be viewed as an asset rather than as a burden. In this talk we discuss a computational framework based on convex relaxation to reduce the computational complexity of an inference procedure when one has access to increasingly larger datasets. Essentially, the statistical gains from larger datasets can be exploited to reduce the runtime of inference algorithms. (Joint work with Michael Jordan.)