Student Paper Competition

Each year, SLDS hosts a student paper competition. Submission deadlines are typically December-January. Winners are announced in January, and awards are presented at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings. Details can be found on our announcements page.

From over 90 submissions, the SLDS student paper competition committee has selected six winning papers (one under the applied track) and two honorable mentions that will be presented at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings in a contributed session (session name: "SLDS Student Paper Awards"). This promises to be a very interesting session, so we encourage JSM attendees to look out for this session in the program.

2025 Student Paper Winners (in alphabetical order)

Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Yizhe Ding	The Pennsylvania State University	Statistical Convergence Rates of Optimal Transport Map Estimation between General Distributions
Jingyi Duan	Cornell University	Active Subsampling for Measurement-constrained M-Estimation of Individualized Thresholds with High-dimensional Data
Michael Hellstern	University of Washington	Assumption-Lean Inference for Spectral Differential Network Analysis of High-Dimensional Time Series
Seugnhyun Lee	Columbia University	Deep Discrete Encoders: Identifiable Deep Generative Models for Rich Data with Discrete Latent Layers
Ye Tian	Columbia University	Learning from Similar Linear Representations: Adaptivity, Minimaxity, and Robustness
Xinran Miao	University of Wisconsin - Madison	Transfer Learning Between U.S. Presidential Elections: How Should We Learn From A 2020 Ad Campaign To Inform 2024 Ad Campaigns?

Honorable Mentions:

Seong Jin Lee	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Low-Rank Online Dynamic Assortment with Dual Contextual Information
Pang Pang Liu	Purdue University	Dual Active Learning for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Many thanks to Xiaoming Huo and Yang Feng for chairing the competition!

Previous years' winners:

2024 Student Paper Winners (in alphabetical order)

Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Considine, Ellen	Harvard University	Optimizing Heat Alert Issuance for Public Health in the United States with Reinforcement Learning
Dharamshi, Ameer	University of Washington	Generalized Data Thinning Using Sufficient Statistics
Su, Buxin	University of Pennsylvania	The Exact Risk of Reference Panel-Based Regularized Estimators
Wen, Xin	Purdue University	Online Statistical Inference for Low-Rank Tensor Learning via Stochastic Gradient Descent
Wu, Shihao	University of Michigan	A General Latent Embedding Approach for Modeling High-Dimensional Hyperlinks
Zeng, Zhenghao	Carnegie Mellon University	Causal Inference with High-Dimensional Discrete Covariates

Honorable Mention

Tang, Runshi	University of Wisconsin-Madison	Mode-Wise Principal Subspace Pursuit and Matrix Spiked Covariance Model
Yu, Myeonghun	University of California, San Diego	Deep Neural Network Expected Shortfall Regression with Heavy-Tailed Data

We would like to thank the SLDS student paper competition committee members for their time, effort, and judgment in the selection process. We would not have been able to process such a large number of submissions without the generous contribution of all our committee members during the holiday season.

For questions, please contact the SLDS 2024 Student Paper Award Co-chairs, Kean Ming Tan (keanming@umich.edu) and Lingsong Zhang (lingsong@purdue.edu).

2023 Winners

Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Rungang Han	University of Wisconsin-Madion	Exact Clustering in Tensor Block Model: Statistical Optimality and Computational Limit
Peter MacDonald	University of Michigan	Latent space models for multiplex networks with shared structure
Tudor Manole	Carnegie Mellon University	Estimating the Number of Components in Finite Mixture Models via the Group-Sort-Fuse Procedure
Weijing Tang	University of Michigan	Population-level Balance in Signed Networks: A Latent Space Approach
Sheng Zhang	North Carolina State University	Distributed Community Detection in Large Networks

Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order):

Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Stefan Stein	University of Warwick	A Sparse Beta Model with Covariates for Networks
Xiaoqing Tan	University of Pittsburgh	A Tree-based Federated Learning Approach for Personalized Treatment Effect Estimation from Heterogeneous Data Sources

2020 Winners

Student Paper Award Winners:
Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Lucy Gao	University of Washington	Testing for Association in Multi-View Network Data
Weibin Mo	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Learning Optimal Distributionally Robust Individualized Treatment Rules
Ilmun Kim	Carnegie Mellon University	Classification accuracy as a proxy for two-sample testing
Yiliang Zhang	University of Pennsylvania	High-Dimensional Nonparametric Density Estimation via Max-Random Forest
Xu Wang	University of Washington	Statistical Inference for Networks of High-Dimensional Point Processes

Honorable Mention:
Kenneth Tay	Stanford University	Reluctant additive modeling
Yinyin Chen	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Learning Topic Models: New Results on Identifiability and Consistency

2019 Winners

Student Paper Winners
Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Yao Chen	Purdue University	Nonlinear Variable Selection via Deep Neural Networks
Zhengling Qi	University of North Carolina Chapel Hill	Estimating Individualized Decision Rules with Tail Controls
Michael Weylandt	Rice University	Dynamic Visualization and Fast Computation for Convex Clustering via Algorithmic Regularization
Yubai Yuan	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	Community Detection with Dependent Connectivity
Yunfeng Zhang Texas	A&M University	Joint association and classification analysis of multi-view data

Honorable Mention
Jingyi Kenneth Tay	Stanford University	Principal component-guided sparse regression

2018 Winners

Winner	Affiliation	Paper Title
Boang Liu	University of Michigan	Network augmented classification
Hyebin Song	University of Wisconsin	PULasso: High-dimensional variable selection with presence-only data
Shuxiao Chen	Cornell University	Valid Inference Corrected for Outlier Removal
Fei Xue	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Variable Selection for Highly Correlated Predictors
Jean Feng	University of Washington	Sparse-Input Neural Networks for High-dimensional Nonparametric Regression and Classification

2017 Winners

Winner	Affiliation	Paper Title
Jianyu Liu	The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill	Graph-based Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis for High Dimensional Classification
Xin Qiu	Columbia University	Composite Interaction Tree for Robust Learning of Optimal Individualized Treatment Rules and Identifying Subgroups
Lauren N. Spirko	Temple University	Variable Selection for Large-Scale Genomic Data with Censored Survival Outcomes
Xiwei Tang	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	Individualized Multilayer Tensor Learning with An Application in Imaging Analysis
Yichen Zhang	New York University	Statistical Inference for Model Parameters in Stochastic Gradient Descent

2016 Winners

Winner	Affiliation	Paper Title
Xuan Bi	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	A Group-Specific Recommender System
Boxiang Wang	University of Minnesota	Another Look at DWD: Thrifty Algorithm and Bayes Risk Consistency in RKHS
Kevin Lee	Pennsylvania State University	Model-Based Clustering for Large Scale Dynamic Networks
Hongyu Yang	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Scalable Rule Lists For Building Logical Classifiers
Yang Ni	Rice University	Sparse Multi-dimensional Graphical Models: A Unified Bayesian Framework