Copulas in Machine Learning– NIPS-2011 Workshop — Call for Abstracts

NIPS-2011 Workshop, Granada, Spain December 16th, 2011
http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~galelidan/CopulaWorkshop
DESCRIPTION

From high-throughput biology and astronomy to voice analysis and medical diagnosis,
a wide variety of complex domains are inherently continuous and high dimensional.
The statistical framework of copulas offers a flexible tool for modeling highly non-linear
multivariate distributions for continuous data. Copulas are a theoretically and
practically important tool from statistics that explicitly allows one to separate the
dependency structure between random variables from their marginal distributions.
Although bivariate copulas are a widely used tool in finance, and have even been famously
accused of “bringing the world financial system to its knees” (Wired Magazine, 2009),
the use of copulas for high dimensional data is in its infancy.

While studied in statistics for many years, copulas have only recently been noticed by a
number of machine learning researchers, with this “new” tool appearing in the recent
leading machine learning conferences (ICML, UAI and NIPS). The goal of this workshop is
to promote the further understanding and development of copulas for the kinds of complex
modeling tasks that are the focus of machine learning. Specifically, the goals of the workshop are to:

· draw the attention of machine learning researchers to the important framework of copulas

· provide a theoretical and practical introduction to copulas

· identify promising research problems in machine learning that could exploit copulas

· bring together researchers from statistics and machine learning working in this area

The target audience includes leading researchers from academia and industry, with the aim of facilitating cross fertilization between different perspectives.
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

We invite submission of abstracts to the workshop. Abstracts will be selected for a short oral or poster presentation.

· Abstracts should be submitted no later than Friday, October 21st, 2011.

· Abstracts should be at most 2 pages long in the NIPS format.

· Abstracts should be submitted by email to galel at huji dot ac dot il
DATES

Submission deadline: October 21st, 2011. Notification of acceptance: November 4th, 2011.
ORGANIZERS

Gal Elidan, The Hebrew University of Jeruslaem
Zoubin Ghahramani Cambridge University and Carnegie Mellon University
John Lafferty, University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University