DNA sequencing is the basic workhorse of modern biology and medicine. Shotgun sequencing is the dominant technique used: many randomly located short fragments called reads are extracted from the DNA sequence, and these reads are assembled to reconstruct the original DNA sequence. Despite major effort by the research community, the DNA sequencing problem remains unresolved from a practical perspective: it is currently not known how to produce a good assembly of most read data-sets. By drawing an analogy between the…

We study particle systems corresponding to highly connected queueing networks. We examine the validity of the so-called Poisson Hypothesis (PH), which predicts that the Markov process, describing the evolution of such particle system, started from a reasonable initial state, approaches the equilibrium in time independent of the size of the network. This is indeed the case in many situations. However, there are networks for which the relaxation process slows down. This behavior reflects the fact that the corresponding infinite system…

We study the sequences of Markov processes defining the evolution of a general symmetric queueng network with the number of nodes tending to infinity. These sequences have limits which are nonlinear Markov processes. Time evolution of these nonlinear Markov processes are sometimes simpler and easier to analyze than the evolution of corresponding prelimit Markov processes on finite graphs. This fact give the possibility to find good approximation for the behavior of symmetric queueing networks on large graphs. Examples will be…

The goal of the talk is to describe a class of solvable random growth models of one and two-dimensional interfaces. The growth is local (distant parts of the interface grow independently), it has a smoothing mechanism (fractal boundaries do not appear), and the speed of growth depends on the local slope of the interface. The models enjoy a rich algebraic structure that is reflected through closed determinantal formulas for the correlation functions. Large time asymptotic analysis of such formulas reveals…

Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA) is a remarkably useful tool for practitioners who had been relying on ad-hoc thresholding methods. Our analysis aims at providing a a framework to test whether the data at hand indeed contains a sparse principal component. More precisely we propose an optimal test procedure to detect the presence of a sparse principal component in a high-dimensional covariance matrix. Our minimax optimal test is based on a sparse eigenvalue statistic. Alas, computing this test is known…

We study a multi-server model with n flexible servers and rn queues, connected through a fixed bipartite graph, where the level of flexibility is captured by the average degree, d(n), of the queues. Applications in content replication in data centers, skill-based routing in call centers, and flexible supply chains are among our main motivations. We focus on the scaling regime where the system size n tends to infinity, while the overall traffic intensity stays fixed. We show that a large…

Low-rank matrix regularization is an important area of research in statistics and machine learning with a wide range of applications. For example, in the context of Missing data imputation arising in recommender systems (e.g. the Netflix Prize), DNA microarray and audio signal processing, among others, the object of interest is a matrix (X) for which the training data comprises of a few noisy linear measurements. The task is to estimate X, under a low rank constraint and possibly additional affine…

Multi-Armed bandits are an elegant model of learning in an unknown and uncertain environment. Such models are relevant in many scenarios, and of late have received increased attention recently due to various problems of distributed control that have arisen in wireless networks, pricing models on the internet, etc. We consider a non-Bayesian multi-armed bandit setting proposed by Lai and Robbins in mid-80s. There are multiple arms each of which generates an i.i.d. reward from an unknown distribution. There are multiple…

We analyze large random two-sided matching markets with different numbers of men and women. We show that being on the short side of the market confers a large advantage, in a sense that the short side roughly chooses the matching while the long side roughly gets chosen. In addition, the matching is roughly the same under all stable matchings. Consider a market with n men and n+k women, for arbitrary 1 <= k<= n/2. We show that, with high probability,…

"Transitory" queueing systems, namely those that exist only for finite time are all around us. And yet, current queueing theory provides with very few models and even fewer tools to understand them. In this talk, I'll introduce a model that may be more appropriate in "transitory" queueing situations. I'll start by first talking about the ``concert arrival game" that we introduced. This model captures the tradeoff in decision-making when users must decide whether to arrive early and wait in a…