Random polytopes and estimation of convex bodies

Series
Job Candidate Talk
Time
Tuesday, January 20, 2015 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Victor-Emmanuel Brunel – Yale University
Organizer
Martin Short
In this talk we will discuss properties of some random polytopes. In particular, we first propose a deviation inequality for the convex hull of i.i.d. random points, uniformly distributed in a convex body. We then discuss statistical properties of this random polytope, in particular, its optimality, when one aims to estimate the support of the corresponding uniform distribution, if it is unknown.We also define a notion of multidimensional quantiles, related to the convex floating bodies, or Tukey depth level sets, for probability measures in a Euclidean space. When i.i.d. random points are available, these multidimensional quantiles can be estimated using their empirical version, similarly to the one-dimensional case, where order statistics estimate the usual quantiles.