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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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TITLE: Two-sample hypothesis testing for random dot product graphs
SPEAKER: Dr. Minh Tang
ABSTRACT:
Two-sample hypothesis testing for random graphs arises naturally in neuroscience, social networks, and machine learning. The talk discusses the nonparametric problems of whether two finite-dimensional random dot product graphs have generating latent positions that are
independently drawn from the same distribution, or distributions that are related via scaling or projection. A consistent test procedure wherein the graphs are first embedded into Euclidean space via spectral decomposition of the adjacency matrices followed by a kernel-based distance measure between the resultant embeddings is then presented. The talk concludes with a discussion of how the proposed test procedure might be applied to the general problem of identifying and classifying local structure in big data graphs, e.g., the identification of repeated processing modules in the neocortex as suggested by the cortical column conjecture, and the challenges that it entails.
