January 18, 2008

CCGS/Statistics Assistant Professor Yufeng Liu recently received a 5-year, $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation for his grant entitled “Flexible Statistical Learning for Complex Data”.  Dr. Liu’s grant will focus on the interdisciplinary research field of statistical learning.  The aims of the grant include developing (1) several novel large-margin classifiers which are expected to yield highly competitive classification accuracy, class probability estimation, and variable selection; (2) a new regularization approach to estimate the covariance matrix for a class of nonstationary spatial autoregressive models; and (3) a novel technique to assess statistical significance of clustering for high dimensional data.  This highly collaborative research will provide new, state-of-the-art statistical learning techniques for solving complicated learning problems and will benefit the fields of cancer research, medical imaging, microarray analysis and spatial-temporal modeling.  The CAREER program at NSF offers its most prestigious awards to support the early career development of junior faculty who are recognized for their integration of research and education and potential for future contributions to their field.  Dr. Liu joined the faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2004 and was awarded the UNC Junior Faculty Development Award in 2006.