Dear researchers,

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) kindly invites you to the third Seminar++ meeting on Machine Learning Theory, taking place on Wednesday April 5 from 15:00 - 17:00. These Seminar++ meetings consist of a one-hour lecture building up to an open problem, followed by an hour of brainstorming time. The meeting is intended for interested researchers including PhD students. These meetings are freely accessible without registration. Cookies, coffee and tea will be provided in the half-time break.

The meeting of 5 April will be hosted by:

Patrick Forré http://amlab.science.uva.nl/people/PatrickForre/ (Assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam https://www.uva.nl/)

A convenient foundation of probability theory for probabilistic programming, graphical models, causality and statistics

*Abstract:* Random functions and functions whose outputs are random functions arise in many areas of statistics, probability theory and computer science, like probabilistic graphical models, causality, the area of conditional independence, probabilistic programming, etc. Despite their frequent appearances the usual measure-theoretic foundations of probability theory are not capable of properly describing such random functions. To avoid typical work-arounds, which often come with inconvenient restrictions, in this talk, we describe how one can instead fix the foundations of probability theory by introducing ‘quasi-measurable spaces’, which then replace the role of measurable spaces. We then demonstrate how the mentioned problems are solved in this framework and further other convenient properties. Furthermore, we show how one can rigorously express probabilistic graphical models and typical causal assumptions using quasi-measurable spaces.

The event takes place in room L016 in the CWI building, Science Park 123, Amsterdam.

The Seminar++ Meetings are part of the Machine Learning Theory Semester Programme https://www.cwi.nl/~wmkoolen/MLT_Sem23/index.html, which runs in Spring 2023.

Best regards on behalf of CWI from the program committee,

Wouter Koolen