University of Warwick Department of Statistics

Congratulations to PhD student Rocco Caprio on the acceptance of his first paper, "Error bounds for particle gradient descent, and extensions of the log-Sobolev and Talagrand inequalities" https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02004, on functional
inequalities and algorithm convergence - it will appear in JMLR.

Recently-completed Warwick PhD student Ian Roberts, with Xavier Didelot, Richard Everitt and Jere Koskela, have had the paper "Bayesian Inference of Pathogen Phylogeography using the Structured Coalescent Model" accepted in PLOS Computational Biology
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012995

"One-step full gradient suffices for low-rank fine-tuning, provably and efficiently", a paper on on LLM fine-tuning by Yuanhe Zhang (Stats CDT 1st year), Dr Fanghui Liu (Warwick DCS), and Prof Yudong Chen (University of Wisconsin-Madison) was accepted by ICML25 as a spotlight https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01235

Congratulations to Romain Palfray who recently passed their PhD viva, the subject being "On the simulation of Lévy processes". A paper from the thesis can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1350486X.2024.2400902?scroll=top&needAccess=true

We are looking forward to Prof. Jonathan Wakefield's talk at the CRiSM colloquium on "Small Area Estimation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries", which will begin at 11am today (come to B3.03 in Zeeman, if you are on campus). Lunch will follow.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/news/crismcolloquium/

New paper from Aleks Mijatović, Benjamin Povar and Gerónimo Uribe Bravo: "Critical branching processes with immigration: scaling limits of local extinction sets". The paper can be found at and Aleks also has a youtube explainer of the paper at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6cBiiJt_90

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Harita Dellaporta, now a research fellow at UCL (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/statistics/dr-harita-dellaporta), recently passed her PhD viva, with a thesis entitled “Robust Bayesian Inference under Model Misspecification and Uncertainty in the Data-Generating Process”. Congratulations Harita!

The latest CIMAT-UNAM-Warwick-Bath network “Frontiers in Statistics and Probability” took place 7-11th April. Details here: https://cuwb.cimat.mx/node/68

The Prob_AI Hub, in which the Department is involved, has just launched its funding for Discipline Hopping Awards for researchers to support a move into the area of probabilistic AI research. The maximum project value is £50k. Deadline 23rd June 2025. https://www.probai.ac.uk/funding/

We are delighted to announce that Prof. Jonathan Wakefield (University of Washington) will deliver the next CRiSM colloquium on 29th May at 11am. he will speak on Small Area Estimation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/news/crismcolloquium/

Applications are still open for our MSc in Statistics. In case you have any questions, we have a Live Chat this Friday (16th May). To register join here: https://meetandengage.com/universityofwarwick -am9ijvthy For more information, see https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/statistics/postgrad/msc/

🗣️ Just 2 weeks until the CRiSM 2.0 - Conference 2025 here at the Warwick Statistics. We can’t wait to welcome you from Wednesday 21st – Friday 23rd May 2025.
If you haven’t already, register for the three-day conference event now (deadline today - 8th May!) 🔗 https://tinyurl.com/2d2b9b7a