Marta Catalano

I am a PhD candidate in Statistics at Bocconi University, under the supervision of Antonio Lijoi and Igor Prünster. I am also member of the Bayes Lab at the Bocconi Institute for Data Science and Analytics (BIDSA), of the “de Castro” Statistics Initiative at Collegio Carlo Alberto and of the MIDAS Complex Data Modeling Research Network.
Previously, I completed my bachelor and master’s degree in Mathematics at University of Rome La Sapienza. A full version of my CV may be found here.

Research Interests

• Bayesian nonparametrics and its applications to survival analysis.
• Optimal transport and Wasserstein distances in BNP.
• Stochastic and point processes with a particular focus on completely random measures.

Talks & Posters

• Invited talk at CMSTATISTICS 2020 13th International Conference of the ERCIM WG on Computational and Methodological Statistics (Virtual conference, December 2020).
• Poster session at WiML 15th Workshop for Women in Machine Learning co-located with NeurIPS (Virtual conference, December 2020)
• Invited talk at BAYSM:O Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting: Online (November 2020)
• Contributed prerecorded talk at Bernoulli-IMS One World Symposium 2020 (August 2020).
• Invited talk at ISBA 2020 15th World Meeting of the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (Kunming, China, June 2020). Postponed to June 2021 due to COVID-19.
• Invited talk at ECOSTA 2020 4th International Conference on Econometrics and Statistics (Limassol, Cyprus, August 2020). Cancelled due to COVID-19.
• Invited talk at XV CLAPEM 2019 Latin American Congress of Probability and Mathematical Statistics (Mérida, Mexico, December 2019).
• Poster session at O’Bayes 2019 Objective Bayes Methodology Conference (Warwick, UK, June 2019).
• Poster session at BNP12 12th International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics (Oxford, UK, June 2019)
• Invited talk at SIS 2019 Smart Statistics for Smart Applications (Milano, Italy, June 2019).
• Invited talk at Second Italian Meeting on Probability and Mathematical Statistics (Vietri sul Mare, Italy, June 2019).

Teaching Assistant

• M.Sc. ECO0152 Numerical and Statistical Methods for Finance at University of Torino (AY 2020/2021).
• M.Sc. 20179 Data Analysis at Bocconi University (AY 2020/2021, 2019/2020, 2018/2019, 2017/2018).
• B.Sc. 30401 Mathematics and Statistics at Bocconi University (AY 2018/2019, 2017/2018).

Preprints

1. Posterior asymptotics for boosted hierarchical Dirichlet process mixtures.
   M. Catalano, P. De Blasi, A. Lijoi and I. Prünster (submitted).
2. Measuring dependence in the Wasserstein distance for Bayesian nonparametric models.
   M. Catalano, A. Lijoi and I. Prünster (under revision).
   Winner of the ASA-SBSS 2021 Student Paper Competition

Publications

1. Transport distances on random vectors of measures: recent advances in Bayesian nonparametrics.
   M. Catalano, A. Lijoi and I. Prünster (2020).
   Special Volume of the XV CLAPEM, Birkhäuser. To appear.
2. Approximation of Bayesian models for time-to-event data.
   M. Catalano, A. Lijoi and I. Prünster (2020).
   Electronic Journal of Statistics, 14, 3366-3395 (pdf).
3. Bayesian model comparison based on Wasserstein distances.
   M. Catalano, A. Lijoi and I. Prünster (2019).
   Book of Short Papers of the Italian Statistical Society, Pearson (pdf).

Awards

• Winner of the ASA-SBSS 2021 Student Paper Competition