Colloquia
The Colloquia are followed by a reception designed to give people the opportunity to have more informal contact with the speaker. A book display will be available at this time in the common room. The series is funded, in part, through the generous support of Oxford University Press.
The colloquia are aimed towards a general mathematical audience.
Please note that the list below only shows forthcoming events, which may not include regular events that have not yet been entered for the forthcoming term. Please see the past events page for a list of all seminar series that the department has on offer.
16:00
Topology and the Curse of Dimensionality
Abstract
The "curse of dimensionality" refers to the host of difficulties that occur when we attempt to extend our intuition about what happens in low dimensions (i.e. when there are only a few features or variables) to very high dimensions (when there are hundreds or thousands of features, such as in genomics or imaging). With very high-dimensional data, there is often an intuition that although the data is nominally very high dimensional, it is typically concentrated around a much lower dimensional, although non-linear set. There are many approaches to identifying and representing these subsets. We will discuss topological approaches, which represent non-linear sets with graphs and simplicial complexes, and permit the "measuring of the shape of the data" as a tool for identifying useful lower dimensional representations.