TRIADS Speaker Series with Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde: Taming the Curse of Dimensionality: Old Ideas and New Strategies

Join Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, for a presentation on Taming the Curse of Dimensionality: Old Ideas and New Strategies. 

Lunch will be served. 

Abstract: A fundamental challenge in dealing with data and models in economics and other social sciences is the curse of dimensionality, i.e., the exponential increase in computational complexity of problems as dimensions grow. This talk will review recent advances in approaches to tame the curse of dimensionality. Some are old ideas that have been rediscovered. Others are new and build on recent developments in hardware and algorithms. In particular, we will discuss: (1) better numerical algorithms (e.g., continuous-time methods, deep learning); (2) better software implementations (e.g.,  functional programming, flexible data structures, advances in massive parallelization); and (3) Better hardware designs (e.g., GPUs, TPUs and other AI accelerators, FPGAs, Quantum computing). We will use many examples from my research during the last few years to motivate and illustrate these ideas.

This event is co-sponsored by The Center For Empirical Research in the Law.