Abstract for the talk at 08.11.2007 (15:00 h)

Bernd Sturmfels (UC Berkeley, USA, and TU Berlin, Germany)

Semigraphoids, Permutohedra, and Mice

Semigraphoids are combinatorial structures that arise in statistical learning theory. They are equivalent to convex rank tests, and to Minkowski summands of the permutohedron, a convex polytope whose vertices are labeled by the elements of the symmetric group. This lecture gives an introduction to this theory, and its application to the design of a new non-parametric test for finding periodically expressed genes from time course microarray experiments.