Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago

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Recorded 24 February 2026. Luis Aparicio of Columbia University presents "Random Matrix Theory Applications to Biology" at IPAM's Mathematics of Cancer: Open Mathematical Problems Workshop.
Abstract: A major challenge in studying single-cell systems and their underlying biological phenomena is their inherently noisy nature. This noise can be caused by technical artifacts, but also can be of biological origin, such as from the stochasticity of gene expression. Interestingly, single-cell RNA-seq data can be mathematically modeled according to a threefold structure: a random matrix, a sparsity induced signal, and a biological signal. Leveraging on the universality properties of spectral distributions and the localization properties of eigenvectors in Random Matrix Theory, it is possible to extract the biological signal and remove the noise and the sparsity induced signal.
Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/mathematics-of-cancer-open-mathematical-problems/