Speaker
Dr. Michele Guindani
Professor, Department of Biostatistics
Fielding School of Public Health
University of California, Los Angeles
Date
Friday, April 25, 2025
11:00 A.M. – 12:00 P.M. ET
Location
Jajodia Auditorium, Room 1101
Nguyen Engineering Building
4511 Patriot Circle
Fairfax Virginia 22030
Bayesian modeling in neuroimaging: Brain networks dynamics
Abstract
The critical role that statistical approaches play in analyzing brain imaging data will be first highlighted, particularly for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Appropriate statistical methods are necessary to handle the complexity of spatial and temporal correlations typical of brain data. More specifically, we will discuss approaches to studying dynamic brain connectivity, which seeks to understand the changing interactions between different brain regions over time. We will present novel Bayesian approaches to capture these dynamic relationships within multivariate time series data. In particular, we will present a scalable Bayesian time-varying tensor vector autoregressive (TV-VAR) model, aimed at efficiently capturing evolving connectivity patterns. This model leverages a tensor decomposition of the VAR coefficient matrices at different lags and sparsity-inducing priors to capture dynamic connectivity patterns.
About the Speaker
Dr. Guindani received his Ph.D. degree in Statistics from Università Bocconi (Milan, Italy) in 2005 under the supervision of Sonia Petrone (Department of Decision Sciences, Università Bocconi, Italy) and Alan E. Gelfand (Department of Statistical Sciences, Duke University). From 2005 to 2007, Dr. Guindani was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, working with Peter Mueller and Gary L. Rosner. Dr. Guindani obtained his first faculty position as an Assistant Professor in Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New Mexico (2007–2010). He then held a position as Assistant Professor (with the award of tenure) in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (2010-2016). From 2016 to June 2022, he held a position as Professor in the Department of Statistics of the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).
Event Organizer
David Kepplinger
Assistant Professor, Department of Statistics
College of Engineering and Computing
George Mason University