Professor of Biostatistics

Adjunct Professor of Statistics

News and Updates

• In our recent paper, Emily Fox and I review the classical notion of Granger causality as well as recent developments based on statistical machine learning.
• CONGRATULATIONS to Aaron Hudson for winning the 2021 David P. Byar Early Career Award. You can read more about Aaron's great work and award here.
• I am excited to start working on my new R01 grant focused on developing novel statistical inference procedures for biomedical big data.
• Our manuscript, In Defense of the Indefensible: A Very Naive Approach to High-Dimensional Inference, has been accepted for publication in Statistical Science.
• Welcome to new postdoctoral fellows, Shubhadeep Chakraborty from Texas A&M University and Lu Xia from University of Michigan. Great to have you both join the lab!
• In collaboration with Simge Küçükyavuz, I have recently revisited my optimization roots to develop mixed integer programming algorithms for learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from observational data. Our first paper has been accepted in INFORMS Journal on Optimization and is available here. Our second paper, available on arXiv, develops a second order conic program for DAG learning with a data-driven early stopping criterion that guarantees a consistent estimate.
• Now former postdoc at the lab, Yue Wang has joined Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor of Statistics. CONGRATULATIONS, Yue!
• In collaboration with the Promislow Lab, we recently investigated changes in metabolic networks associated with the effect of dietary restrictions on longevity. The resulting paper, highlighted with a perspective article in PLoS Genetics, uses our recent tool for differential network analysis, available in the CorDiffViz package.
• Steven (Xu) Wang's paper on Inference for networks of high-dimensional point processes has won a Best Student Paper Award from ASA Statistical Learning and Data Science. CONGRATULATIONS, Steven!
• Our new manuscript, The Generalized Matrix Decomposition Biplot and Its Application to Microbiome Data has been published as Editor's Pick in mSystems.
• CONGRATULATIONS to Xiudi Li for winning the Donovan J Thompson Award. Nice job, Xiudi!
• My new manuscripts, Differential Network Analysis: A Statistical Perspective, provides an overview of statistical methods for detecting changes in networks.
• Our paper, Joint Structural Break Detection and Parameter Estimation in High-Dimensional Non-Stationary VAR Models, has been accepted for publication in JASA.
• CONGRATULATIONS to Shiqing Yu for successfully defending his PhD dissertation. Nice job, Dr. Yu!
• We have two new papers in JMLR on estimation of undirected and directed graphical models:
  - The Reduced PC-Algorithm: Improved Causal Structure Learning in Large Random Networks (link)
  - Generalized Score Matching for Non-Negative Data (link)