Universal Limits in High-Dimensional Statistics

The MIT Center on Operations Research is hosting a talk tomorrow on universal limits in high-dimensional statistics. The basic idea is that, for all fields of empirical study from sociology to high-energy physics, some criterion for "statistical significance" is crucial for making decisions based on the data. (The current hunt for the Higgs Boson particle is in fact based on a modified criterion for statistical significance.) The problem, however, is that we are entering a world of big data, in which data structures have many dimensions, thus altering the potential usefulness of such criterion for statistical significance.