Deep learning has achieved tremendous success in recent years. In simple words, deep learning uses the composition of many nonlinear functions to model the complex dependency between input features and labels. While neural networks have a long history, recent advances have greatly improved their performance in computer vision, natural language processing, etc. From the statistical and scientific perspective, it is natural to ask: What is deep learning? What are the new characteristics of deep learning, compared with classical methods? What are the theoretical foundations of deep learning? To answer these questions, we introduce common neural network models (e.g., convolutional neural nets, recurrent neural nets, generative adversarial nets) and training techniques (e.g., stochastic gradient descent, dropout, batch normalization) from a statistical point of view. Along the way, we highlight new characteristics of deep learning (including depth and over-parametrization) and explain their practical and theoretical benefits. We also sample recent results on theories of deep learning, many of which are only suggestive. While a complete understanding of deep learning remains elusive, we hope that our perspectives and discussions serve as a stimulus for new statistical research.
Factor models are a class of powerful statistical models that have been widely used to deal with dependent measurements that arise frequently from various applications from genomics and neuroscience to economics and finance. As data are collected at an ever-growing scale, statistical machine learning faces some new challenges: high dimensionality, strong dependence among observed variables, heavy-tailed variables and heterogeneity. High-dimensional robust factor analysis serves as a powerful toolkit to conquer these challenges. This paper gives a selective overview on recent advance on high-dimensional factor models and their applications to statistics including Factor-Adjusted Robust Model selection (FarmSelect) and Factor-Adjusted Robust Multiple testing (FarmTest). We show that classical methods, especially principal component analysis (PCA), can be tailored to many new problems and provide powerful tools for statistical estimation and inference. We highlight PCA and its connections to matrix perturbation theory, robust statistics, random projection, false discovery rate, etc., and illustrate through several applications how insights from these fields yield solutions to modern challenges. We also present far-reaching connections between factor models and popular statistical learning problems, including network analysis and low-rank matrix recovery.