Seminar Series

Our seminar series features talks from innovators from academia, industry, and national labs. These talks provide a forum for thought leaders to share their work, discuss trends, and stimulate collaboration. Recordings are posted to a YouTube playlist.

Algorithms and Applications of Edge-Colored Hypergraph Clustering
 

Nate Veldt
Nate Veldt | Texas A&M University


Consider a group of individuals (e.g., academic researchers) who participate in multiway interactions (e.g., a group of researchers publish a paper), where the interaction is associated with a certain categorical label (e.g., the paper is on machine learning). How can we use this categorical multiway information to classify or cluster the individuals (e.g., what is the field of each academic researcher?). In this talk I'll introduce Edge-Colored Clustering (ECC) in hypergraphs, which provides a formal framework for these types of categorical clustering problems. We'll consider several algorithmic results with approximation guarantees for addressing different variants of the problem. We'll also look at several applications, including categorizing food ingredients based on the types of recipes they tend to appear in. Finally, we'll show a connection between ECC and a recent framework for classifying labeled nodes in temporal bipartite graphs.​

Nate Veldt is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on combinatorial algorithms and discrete optimization for network analysis and data science. He received the 2023 SIAM Activity Group on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms Early Career Prize. Currently he serves as the secretary for this SIAM Activity Group. He obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Wheaton College and a PhD in mathematics with a concentration in computational science from Purdue University in 2019. ​