报告简介  Abstract

A central question of genetics is to understand how genetic variations contribute to phenotypic variation. In this talk, we will begin our discussion with RA Fisher’s 1918 seminal paper which largely resolved the debate between Mendelians and Biometricians (i.e., Pea vs. Height debate). To see how and why it is relevant in today’s genome era, we will share our experience in large-scale modern genetic data analysis. We will show how the random-effects model introduced by RA Fisher plays a role in the cross-population analysis (UK biobank data from European Ancestry and WeGene data from East Asian Ancestry). In particular, we will discuss the connection between the random-effects model and other related methods in machine learning, such as ridge regression, Gaussian process and stochastic approximation, emphasizing the seamless integration of statistics and computation for Data Science.  This is joint work with Ph.D. students CAI Mingxuan, XIAO Jiashun, and ZHANG Shunkang.

嘉宾简介  About the Speaker

Dr. Yang Can is now working as an assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics, HKUST. He obtained BS. and M.Phil. Degrees at Zhejiang University 2003, and 2006, and Ph.D. Degree at HKUST in 2011. He was a postdoc (2011-2012) and associate scientist (2012-2014) at Yale. His research area focuses on the development of statistical methods and the application of computational tools to large-scale genomic data, including BOOST and GPA. His research papers have appeared in high impact journals, such as Annals of Statistics, Bioinformatics, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, PLoS Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The American Journal of Human Genetics. Based on his contribution to data analytic methods and tools, Dr. Yang won the 2012 Hong Kong Young Scientist Award in Engineering Science. As of May 2020, Dr. Yang’s work has been cited 2,978 times, with h-index 25, and i10-index 37. Dr. Yang has also established industrial collaboration with WeGene (a direct-to-consumer DNA ancestry testing platform and personalized healthcare testing provider), as supported by the Innovation and Technology Fund of Hong Kong Government.

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