Patrick Wolfe (UCL, Dept of Statistical Science)
Network Analysis and Nonparametric Statistics

Networks are ubiquitous in today's world. Any time we make observations about people, places, or things and the interactions between them, we have a network. Yet a quantitative understanding of real-world networks is in its infancy, and must be based on strong theoretical and methodological foundations. The goal of this talk is to provide some insight into these foundations from the perspective of nonparametric statistics, in particular how trade-offs between model complexity and parsimony can be balanced to yield practical algorithms with provable properties.