Statistical issues arising in emerging modalities of dynamic brain imaging

Mark Reimers, Neuroscience Program, Michigan State University, USA

As big data in genomics has stimulated many new statistical endeavors, the emergence of optical imaging methods, generating terabytes of dynamic high-resolution brain activity data, is leading to many new statistical problems. There are the usual problems of an emerging technology, to do with noise reduction and artifact removal. However, these rich data pose many more scientifically interesting statistical problems addressing theories of brain dynamics, and bridging dynamical systems ideas and high-dimensional statistical inference. This talk will focus on some of these more scientifically interesting problems, and discuss current attempts to address them.