Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We show that multilinear dyadic paraproducts and Haar multipliers, as well as their commutators with locally integrable functions, can be pointwise dominated by multilinear sparse operators. These results lead to various quantitative weighted norm inequalities for these operators. In particular, we introduce multilinear analog of Bloom's inequality, and prove it for the commutators of the multilinear Haar multipliers.

Biology is becoming increasingly quantitative, with large genomic datasets being curated at a rapid rate. Sound mathematical modeling as well as data science approaches are both needed to take advantage of these newly available datasets. I will describe two projects that span these approaches. The first is a Markov chain model of naturalselection acting at two scales, motivated by the virulence-transmission tradeoff from pathogen evolution. This stochastic model, under a natural scaling, converges to a nonlinear deterministic system for which we can analytically derive steady-state behavior. This analysis, along with simulations, leads to general properties of selection at two scales. The second project is a bioinformatics pipeline that identifies gene copy number variants, currently a difficult problem in modern genomics. This quantificationof copy number variation in turn generates new mathematical questionsthat require the type of probabilistic modelling used in the first project.

A subset of $\mathbb{F}_3^n$ is called a \emph{cap set} if it does not contain three vectors that sum to zero. In dimension four, this relates to the famous card game SET: a cap set corresponds to a collection of cards without a SET. The cap set problem is concerned with upper bounds on the size of cap sets. The central question raised by Frankl, Graham and R\”odl is: do cap sets have exponentially small density? May last year, this question was (unexpectedly) resolved in a pair of papers by Croot, Lev, and Pach and by Ellenberg and myself in a new application of the polynomial method. The proof is surprisingly short and simple.

Demand forecasting plays an important role in many inventory control problems. To mitigate the potential harms of model misspecification, various forms of distributionally robust optimization have been applied. Although many of these methodologies suffer from the problem of time-inconsistency, the work of Klabjan et al. established a general time-consistent framework for such problems by connecting to the literature on robust Markov decision processes. Motivated by the fact that many forecasting models exhibit very special structure, as well as a desire to understand the impact of positing different dependency structures, in this talk we formulate and solve a time-consistent distributionally robust multi-stage newsvendor model which naturally unifies and robustifies several inventory models with demand forecasting. In particular, many simple models of demand forecasting have the feature that demand evolves as a martingale (i.e. expected demand tomorrow equals realized demand today). We consider a robust variant of such models, in which the sequence of future demands may be any martingale with given mean and support. Under such a model, past realizations of demand are naturally incorporated into the structure of the uncertainty set going forwards. We explicitly compute the minimax optimal policy (and worst-case distribution) in closed form, by combining ideas from convex analysis, probability, and dynamic programming. We prove that at optimality the worst-case demand distribution corresponds to the setting in which inventory may become obsolete at a random time, a scenario of practical interest. To gain further insight, we prove weak convergence (as the time horizon grows large) to a simple and intuitive process. We also compare to the analogous setting in which demand is independent across periods (analyzed previously by Shapiro), and identify interesting differences between these models, in the spirit of the price of correlations studied by Agrawal et al. This is joint work with Linwei Xin, and the paper is available on arxiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09437v1