Using Animal Instincts to Find Efficient Experimental Designs for Biomedical Studies

Friday July 12, 2pm, Carslaw 373

Weng Kee Wong ( UCLA School of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics)

Title: Using Animal Instincts to Find Efficient Experimental Designs for Biomedical Studies

This talk reviews and discusses nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms as general purpose optimization tools for solving problems in statistics. The approach works quite magically and frequently finds an optimal solution or a nearly optimal solution quickly. There is virtually no explicit assumption required for such methods to be applicable and the user only needs to input a few easy tuning parameters. We focus on one of the more popular algorithms, particle swarm optimization (PSO), and demonstrate, as an application, its ability to find various types of optimal experimental designs for dose response studies and other biomedical problems, including optimal designs for generalized linear models with many interacting factors and standardized maximin optimal designs, where effective algorithms to find them have remained stubbornly elusive until now.