Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Causality and Algebraic Geometry

Algebra & Discrete Mathematics

Speaker: Andrew Critch, UC Berkeley
Location: 1147 MSB
Start time: Wed, May 1 2013, 12:10PM

The theory of graphical causal models is a major entry point to the budding field of algebraic statistics, where algebraic geometry meets statistical modelling, and this talk will give an introduction to it from the perspective of an algebraic geometer. I'll introduce some conceptual tools and methods that are peculiar to algebraic statistics, and work through an example such causal inference computation using the commutative algebra software Macaulay2. At the end I'll review some of my research on hidden Markov models, and their close connection to matrix product state models of quantum-entangled qubits.