On statistics, computation and scalability
MICHAEL I. JORDAN
Department of Statistics and Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley, CA,
USA. E-mail: jordan@stat.berkeley.edu; url: www.cs.berkeley.edu/˜jordan
How should statistical procedures be designed so as to be scalable computationally to the massive
datasets that are increasingly the norm? When coupled with the requirement that an answer to
an inferential question be delivered within a certain time budget, this question has significant
repercussions for the field of statistics. With the goal of identifying “time-data tradeoffs,” we
investigate some of the statistical consequences of computational perspectives on scability, in
particular divide-and-conquer methodology and hierarchies of convex relaxations.