[gov3009-l] Applied Statistics Workshop 9/24

Hi everyone! Our speaker this Wednesday (9/24) at Applied Stats will be our own* Brandon Stewart, *who will be practicing his job talk. Brandon will be giving a talk entitled *Latent Factor Regressions for the Social Sciences**. *The abstract for the talk is included below. As per usual, we will meet in CGIS K354 at 12 noon and lunch will be served. I look forward to seeing you all there! Thank you! -- Dana Higgins *Abstract: *I present a general framework for regression in the presence of complex dependence structures between units such as in time-series cross-sectional data, relational/network data, and spatial data. These types of data are challenging for standard multilevel models because they involve multiples types of structure (e.g. temporal effects and cross-sectional effects) which are interactive. I show that interactive latent factor models provide a powerful modeling alternative that can address a wide range of data types. Although, related models have previously been proposed in several different fields, inference is typically cumbersome and slow. I introduce a class of fast variational inference algorithms that allow for models to be fit quickly and accurately.