STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM
THURSDAY, October 22nd, 2009 at 4.10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments: 3.30pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Speaker: Samuel Kou (Harvard University)
Title: Statistical inference in nanoscale biophysics
Abstract: Recent advances in nanotechnology allow scientists for the first time to follow a biological process on a single molecule basis.
These advances also raise many challenging statistical inference problems. First, on the single-molecule level, by the law of statistical and quantum mechanics, the dynamics/process of a biomolecule is stochastic. Second, since the experiments focus on and study only a few molecules, the data in single-molecule experiments are much noisier than
those in the traditional ensemble experiments in that one cannot use the actions of thousands of molecules to average out the noise. Third, inferring the underlying stochastic dynamics is usually complicated by the presence of latent processes. In this talk we will use the inference of DNA hairpin kinetics to illustrate the statistical and probabilistic challenges in single-molecule biophysics, and introduce a Bayesian data augmentation method to address the inference difficulties.
This talk is based on joint works with the Xie group at Harvard Chemistry Department.
