he choice about whether to do crossfit or jogging could be tailored to an individual based on how their heart beat progression has looked up until the moment the decision needs to be made.
My research examines the underlying principles involved in modeling a continuous process and using it to predict a future outcome. I am currently working to apply it to a practical problem — depression in humans. Mental health workers use existing methodology to assign numerical scores to indicate severity of depression. Like heart rate, this is a value that may be constantly changing over a day, a week, or a year. We can tailor a treatment strategy using past information about the trajectory of someone’s depression score to find a medication that works best for that particular individual. I hope that the results of this research could be useful in improving the quality of life of people suffering from depression and that the underlying statistical tools could have broader applications in other fields.
Robert is a PhD Candidate whose research interests include computational statistics and machine learning. His current research focuses on functional Q-learning. We thought this posting was a great excuse to get to know a little more about him, so we we asked him a few questions!
Q: What do you find most interesting/compelling about your research?
A: I enjoy the challenge inherent in solving a problem that doesn’t have a standard solution. A lot of elementary statistics involves applying tools that are already well understood, but research allows you to develop something rigorous that could become a standard practice in the future.
Q: What do you see are the biggest or most pressing challenges in your research area?
A: Sequential decision making needs a lot of data, nonparametric problems tend to need a lot of data, so multi-stage, sequential problems that are estimated using nonparametric methods might need a lot^2 of data to be good.
Q: The poem Antigonish begins:
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!
Write a 200 word sitcom pitch for a family comedy based on this snippet.
A: Theodore and His Imaginary Frenemy
4th grader Theodore Giffel had always been an outsider and had a hard time connecting with others. He always wanted a friend who would never leave his side, but after he fell down the stairs and got a concussion, he woke up with more friend than he bargained for. Ricky Morton, his imaginary friend, began causing trouble in Theo’s life as soon as he entered it. Theo would be blamed for the havoc caused by Ricky, who seems to be motivated only by mayhem. Despite this, Ricky stuck by Theo all the time and always kept him busy, even when Theo wished he wouldn’t. Coming this fall on Laber Labs TV!