Nikola Surjanovic

Nikola Surjanovic

PhD Candidate in Statistics

The University of British Columbia

Biography

I am a Vanier Scholar pursuing a PhD in Statistics at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dr. Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and Dr. Trevor Campbell. My research interests include scalable Bayesian inference and machine learning.

I am also a core contributor and founding member of the Pigeons software project. If you have a difficult sampling or integration problem, leave me a message and/or check out our software!

I was previously a co-chair and founding member of the Student Committee of the Western North American Region of the International Biometric Society. I previously held an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship (Master’s level) of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and was a recipient of the Governor General’s Silver Medal.

Interests
  • Scalable Bayesian inference
  • Annealing algorithms
  • Machine learning
  • Astrostatistics
Education
  • PhD in Statistics, Present

    The University of British Columbia

  • MSc in Statistics, 2021

    Simon Fraser University

  • BSc in Statistics (Minor in Mathematics), 2019

    Simon Fraser University

Recent Publications

(2024). Uniform ergodicity of parallel tempering with efficient local exploration. Submitted.

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(2024). autoMALA --- Locally adaptive Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics.

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(2024). MCMC-driven learning. To appear in the Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo.

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(2024). Alpha-trimming --- Locally adaptive tree pruning for random forests.

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(2023). Pigeons.jl --- Distributed Sampling From Intractable Distributions. Submitted.

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News and Upcoming Events

 
 
 
 
 
Invited talk at the Seminar on Advances in Probabilistic Machine Learning
Nov 2024 – Nov 2024 Virtual (Aalto University and ELLIS Unit in Helsinki)
 
 
 
 
 
Presentations at the ISBA World Meeting and BAYSM Meeting 2024
Jul 2024 – Jul 2024 Venice, Italy
 
 
 
 
 
Presentations at the Annual Meeting of the Statistical Society of Canada and CSSC 2024
Jun 2024 – Jun 2024 St. John's, NL, Canada
 
 
 
 
 
Presentations at BAYSM and CANSSI Showcase 2023
Nov 2023 – Nov 2023 Virtual
 
 
 
 
 
Invited talk at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics
Jul 2023 – Jul 2023 Harvard University, MA, USA
 
 
 
 
 
Presentation at JuliaCon 2023
Jul 2023 – Jul 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA

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