On Sept. 25th, we were honored to have a virtual seminar featuring Dr. Xiaoli Meng of Harvard University. Dr. Meng is not only a charismatic speaker but also a prestigious scholar in the fields of statistics and pedagogy.

The topic of his talk was Pushing Large-p-Small-n to Infinite-p-Zero-n: A Multi-resolution Theory for Individualized Predictions and for A World Without Bias-Variance Trade-off. In a simplistic yet informative manner, Dr. Meng explained his new findings on multi-resolution (MR) for individualized predictions. An interesting revelation was there could be a world without variance if the outcome is a deterministic function of potentially infinitely many predictors. As statistics students, we are trained to think that everything is with random error and are used to the framework of bias-variance tradeoff. Dr. Meng’s new insight opened our imagination and prompted us to think about problems from different perspectives. During the Q&A session, the discussion between Dr. Meng and Dr. Hulin Wu provoked the philosophical question of whether we are living in a deterministic world or a stochastic world. What do you think?

We would like to thank Dr. Meng again for his fabulous talk.