We consider statistical and computation methods to infer trajectories of a stochastic process from snapshots of its temporal marginals. This problem arises in the analysis of single cell RNA-sequencing data. The goal of this mini-course is to present and understand the estimator proposed by [Lavenant et al. 2020] which searches for the diffusion process that fits the observations with minimal entropy relative to a Wiener process. This estimator comes with consistency guarantees—for a suitable class of ground truth processes—and lends itself to computational methods with global optimality guarantees. Its analysis is the occasion to review important tools from optimal transport and diffusion process theory.[-]

We consider statistical and computation methods to infer trajectories of a stochastic process from snapshots of its temporal marginals. This problem arises in the analysis of single cell RNA-sequencing data. The goal of this mini-course is to present and understand the estimator proposed by [Lavenant et al. 2020] which searches for the diffusion process that fits the observations with minimal entropy relative to a Wiener process. This estimator comes with consistency guarantees—for a suitable class of ground truth processes—and lends itself to computational methods with global optimality guarantees. Its analysis is the occasion to review important tools from optimal transport and diffusion process theory.[-]

We consider statistical and computation methods to infer trajectories of a stochastic process from snapshots of its temporal marginals. This problem arises in the analysis of single cell RNA-sequencing data. The goal of this mini-course is to present and understand the estimator proposed by [Lavenant et al. 2020] which searches for the diffusion process that fits the observations with minimal entropy relative to a Wiener process. This estimator comes with consistency guarantees—for a suitable class of ground truth processes—and lends itself to computational methods with global optimality guarantees. Its analysis is the occasion to review important tools from optimal transport and diffusion process theory.[-]