Complexity, Phase Transitions, and Inference by Cristopher Moore (part 1)

There is a deep analogy between statistical inference and statistical physics. I will give a friendly introduction to both of these fields. I will then discuss phase transitions in problems like community detection in networks, and clustering of sparse high-dimensional data, where if our data becomes too sparse or too noisy it becomes impossible to find the underlying pattern; moreover, I will discuss optimal algorithms that succeed as well as possible up to this point. Along the way, I will visit ideas