Marta Sales-Pardo

Associate Professor, Departament d'Engineyria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili

A Bayesian approach to learning mathematical models from data

March 29, 2023 - 12:00 PM Eastern Time

Location:

E100 Innovation Hall (viewing party)

Virtual Location:

Zoom

Talk Abstract:

For a few centuries, scientists have described natural phenomena by means of relatively simple mathematical models such as Newton's law of gravitation or Snell's law of refraction. Sometimes, they found these models deductively, starting from fundamental considerations; more frequently, however, they derived the models inductively from data. With increasing amounts of data available for all sorts of (natural and social) systems, one may argue that we are now in a position to inductively uncover new interpretable models for these systems. But can this process be automatized? That is, can we design algorithms that automatically learn, from data, the closed-form mathematical models that generated them? And if so, are the true generating models always learnable? In the talk I will discuss how we can use inference approaches to define what we call a Bayesian machine scientists which can obtain closed-form mathematical models from data. We will see how often, noisy observations result in there being multiple models that can describe our data well. Nonetheless, with our approach we can show that there is a transition occurring between: (i) a learnable phase at low observation noise, in which the true model can in principle be learned from the data; and (ii) an unlearnable phase, in which the observation noise is too large for the true model to be learned from the data by any method.

Speaker Bio:

Marta Sales-Pardo obtained a PhD in Physics from Universitat de Barcelona. She did her postdoctoral work at Northwestern University, where she was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and later she became a Research Assistant Professor at the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Science Institute with joint appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2009 she moved to Universitat Rovira i Virgili where she is now a Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

In 2013 and 2021 she received an ICREA Acadèmia Award for her excellence in research. From 2019 until 2021 she was member of the Advisory Board of the McDonnell Foundation. Since 2021 she is a Fellow of the Network Science Society. Since July 2022 she is the president of the Catalan Complex Systems Society.