Nicolas Verzelen

Research Scientist, MISTEA Laboratory, INRAE Univ. Montpellier 2 place Pierre Viala 34060, Montpellier CEDEX 2, France E-Mail: nicolas.verzelen [@] inrae [DOT] fr

About me

I work as a research scientist (aka chargé de recherche, hdr) in Statistics and Machine Learning within INRAE. I am mostly interested in the analysis of popular algorithms for modern data science with a particular emphasis on methods for agroecological data.

Research

My current research interests include

• unsupervised learning (clustering, ranking)

• high-dimensional minimax theory and computational trade-offs.

• active learning

• applications to seed exchange networks

• applications to agroecology

Duties

• I currently serve as an associate editor for the Annals of Statistics, Bernoulli, and as an editor in chief for ESAIM: P&S.
  

• I am in charge of the Probability and Statistics team of MISTEA

Some recent publications

1. B. Even, C. Giraud, and N. Verzelen. Computation-information gap in high-dimensional clustering. Accepted in COLT 2024 [ArXiv]

2. J. Mariel, I. Sanchez, N. Verzelen, F. Massol, S. Carrière, and V. Labeyrie The role of farmers’ networks in sourcing planting material and information in a context of agroforestry transition in Madagascar. Agricultural Systems, 217, 2024 [Article]

3. E. Pilliat, A. Carpentier, and N. Verzelen. Optimal rates for ranking a permuted isotonic matrix in polynomial time. Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 3236–3273, 2024. [Article] [ArXiv]

4. E. Saad, A. Carpentier, and N. Verzelen. Active Ranking of Experts Based on their Performances in Many Tasks. ICML (oral presentation), 2023. [Article] [ArXiv]

5. N. Verzelen, M. Fromont, M. Lerasle, and P. Reynaud-Bouret. Optimal Change-Point Detection and Localization. Annals of Statistics, 51(4):1586–1610, 2023. [Article] [ArXiv]

Full list of publications.

Supervision

Current Students:

• Victor Thuot PhD co-supervised with Alexandra Carpentier. (2023-2026?)

• Bertrand Even, PhD co-supervised with Christophe Giraud. (2023-2026?)

• Maximilian Graf, PhD co-supervised with Alexandra Carpentier. (2023-2026?)

• Clément Berenfeld, Post-doc co-supervised with Alexandra Carpentier. (2022-2025)

Alumni:

• Emmanuel Pilliat [PhD 2020–2023] co-supervised with Alexandra Carpentier and Joseph Salmon. Now Assistant Professor at ENSAI.

• El Mehdi Saad [Post-doc 2022–2023], co-supervised with Alexandra Carpentier. Now Assistant Professor at Centrale Supélec.

• Yann Issartel [PhD 2017–2020], co-supervised with Christophe Giraud. Now Assistant Professor at Telecom-Paris.

• Solène Thépaut [PhD 2016–2019] co-supervised with Christophe Giraud. Now Research engineer at Safran.

Teaching

Currently:

• Statistical Machine Learning [HMMA308], jointly with Joseph Salmon and Benjamin Charlier.