19 Aug 14:15 Alon Orlitsky: Foreseeing the Unseen: Probability Estimation over Large Alphabets

Professor Alon Orlitsky (UC San Diego) will give a guest lecture on Thursday, August 19, at 14:15 in Exactum, room B222. The title of the talk is

"Foreseeing the Unseen: Probability Estimation over Large Alphabets".

Abstract:
Many applications call for estimating probabilities of rare, even previously unseen, events. We first outline the problem's theory, applications, and relation to works by Fisher, Shakespeare, Laplace, Good, Turing, Hardy, Ramanujan, and Shannon, and then describe recent constructions of asymptotically optimal estimators. Based on joint work with P. Santhanam, P. Viswanathan, J. Zhang, and others.