STUDENTS
Current Students
Marc Richards
Ph.D. Student (Expected 2024) mmr113 [at] pitt [dot] edu 2021 NFL Big Data Bowl Grand Champion |
Prior to attending the University of Pittsburgh, I received my undergraduate degree in mathematics and statistics at St. Olaf College while playing Division III college hockey. After St. Olaf, I spent over 3 years modeling natural disasters for a reinsurance brokerage in Minneapolis. My research interests are in understanding modern machine learning algorithms and spatial temporal statistics with applications to sports and crime among others. Under Dr. Mentch, Wei Peng and I were a part of a team that were recipients of a $25,000 Grand Prize in the 2020-21 NFL Big Data where we used next generation player tracking data to identify individual defensive player responsibility and create evaluation metrics. My current research with Dr. Mentch involves quantifying the effects COVID-19 and the protests had on crime across US Cities. Beyond academic research, I work part-time for the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Strategy and Research group within Basketball Operations.
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Taehee Jung
Ph.D. Student (Expected 2023) taj41 [at] pitt [dot] edu homepage : http://theejung.github.io/ |
Before coming to Pitt, I received my Masters in Statistics from University of California, Berkeley. I am generally interested in Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications. Specifically, my two main research goals are (1) investigating the limitations of current neural network systems, particularly on natural language processing (NLP) problems and (2) developing more statistically-stable models to address the limitations. One of my recent papers (EMNLP 2019) analyzed the biases on corpora and systems in textual summarization with respect to different sub-aspects (i.e., positions of the sentences, sentence importance, and diversity). My current work with Dr.Mentch is to analyze how the neural models make the biased posterior prediction on downstream NLP tasks (e.g., Part of Speech (PoS) tagging, GLUE), and develop a better-calibrated alternative. During the Summer of 2019, I interned at 3M HIS (M*Modal, Pittsburgh, PA) to develop a PoS tagger for clinical documents.
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Lixia Yi
Ph.D. Student (Expected 2023) liy70 [at] pitt [dot] edu |
Before coming to Pitt, I received my undergraduate in statistics from Shandong University and later a Masters degree in statistics from UW-Madison. My research interest lies generally in different aspects of statistical machine learning and I am currently studying knockoff methods in variable selection. In the meantime, I am also involved as a GSR in the Geography of Philosophy project led by Professor Machery focusing on experimental design and statistical analysis. |
Siyu Zhou
Ph.D. Student (Expected 2022) siz25 [at] pitt [dot] edu Mellon Fellow: 2020-2021 |
Prior coming to Pitt, I received my Master’s degree from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. My research interests are generally about mechanisms behind statistical learning methods. I have been working with Dr. Mentch on understanding the role of the unique randomization in random forests. We have demonstrated that this additional randomness injected into individual trees serves as a form of implicit regularization and thus makes random forest one of the best off-the-shelf learning method, especially on noisy data. Currently, I’m studying the role played by noise variables in prediction and hypothesis testing. |
Former Students
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Wei Peng Ph.D. Statistics 2021 Next Position: Data Scientist, SignatureDx 2018 Department of Statistics Outstanding (Senior) Graduate Student Award Mellon Fellow: 2019-2020 2021 NFL Big Data Bowl Grand Champion Tim Coleman Ph.D. Statistics 2020 Next Position: Postdoc, USC (Jacob Bien) 2018 Department of Statistics Outstanding (Junior) Graduate Student Award Mellon Fellow: 2019-2020 Nick Kissel B.S./M.S. Statistics 2018/2019 Next Position: Ph.D. Student, Dept. of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University 2018 Department of Statistics Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award Zach Fulker B.S. Mathematics and Economics 2018 Next Position: Ph.D. Student, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University Tyler Folta
B.S./M.A. Statistics/Applied Statistics 2017/2018 Next Position: Medical Analyst, HVH Precision Analytics |