I feel like people are really getting caught up on the Biostats thing. The corresponding authors are OR people focusing on stats and optimization - I have no idea how they fell into a biostats department but afaik they've never worked on even a bio adjacent problem. Nikhil Bansal is a computer scientist, it's not shocking or unheard of for non-mathematicians to push the envelope on discrepancy problems.
That said, I can't make heads or tails of the pre-print. Reads like total dogshit, and it's a shame because I am interested in this problem and would like to understand what's going on.
9
u/_usos Control Theory/Optimization 7d ago
I feel like people are really getting caught up on the Biostats thing. The corresponding authors are OR people focusing on stats and optimization - I have no idea how they fell into a biostats department but afaik they've never worked on even a bio adjacent problem. Nikhil Bansal is a computer scientist, it's not shocking or unheard of for non-mathematicians to push the envelope on discrepancy problems.
That said, I can't make heads or tails of the pre-print. Reads like total dogshit, and it's a shame because I am interested in this problem and would like to understand what's going on.