Hello, thanks for checking out my website.

I’m Leo Duan. I’m a statistician and an assistant professor working at University of Florida since 2018. Prior to that, I obtained my PhD in Mathematics at University of Cincinnati in 2015 under the supervision of Rhonda Szczesniak and Xia Wang, worked a year as a data scientist in the tech sector, and spent two years as a postdoc working with David Dunson at Johns Hopkins and Duke University.

Research Interests

My recent research focuses on the following areas (with some representative works):

1. Optimization & Bayes:

   • Yu Zheng and Leo L. Duan. Gibbs Sampling using Anti-correlation Gaussian Data Augmentation, with Applications to L1-ball-type Models. pdf Revision at JMLR, 2024+
   • Cheng Zeng,Eleni Dilma, Jason Xu and Leo L. Duan. Bridged Posterior: Optimization, Profile Likelihood and a New Approach for Generalized Bayes. * Joint first authors. pdf 2024+
   • Maoran Xu and Leo L. Duan. Bayesian Inference with the L1-ball Prior: Solving Combinatorial Problems with Exact Zeros. JRSSB, 2023.
   • Maoran Xu, Hua Zhou, Yujie Hu and Leo L. Duan. Bayesian Inference using the Proximal Mapping: Uncertainty Quantification under Varying Dimensionality. JASA, 2023.
   • Leo L. Duan. High-Accuracy Posterior Approximation via Random Transport. JASA, 2021.
   • Leo L. Duan. Latent Simplex Position Model. JMLR, 2020.
   • Leo L. Duan, Alex Young, Akihiko Nishimura, and David B. Dunson. Bayesian Constraint Relaxation. Biometrika 2019.
   • Leo L. Duan, James E. Johndrow, and David B. Dunson. Scaling up Data Augmentation MCMC via Calibration. JMLR, 2018.

2. Graph, Clustering & Bayes:

   • Leo L. Duan and Anirban Bhattacharya. Graph-accelerated Markov Chain Monte Carlo. pdf 2024+
   • Leo L. Duan and David B. Dunson. Bayesian Spanning Tree: Estimating the Backbone of the Dependence Graph. JMLR 2024.
   • Leo L. Duan and Arkaprava Roy. Spectral Clustering, Spanning Forest, and Bayesian Forest Process. JASA, 2023.
   • Cheng Zeng, Jeffrey Miller and Leo L. Duan. Quasi-Bernoulli Stick-breaking: Infinite Mixture with Cluster Consistency. JMLR, 2023
   • Leo L. Duan, Zeyu Yuwen, George Michailidis and Zhengwu Zhang. Bayesian Vector Autoregression using the Tree Rank Prior. JMLR, 2023
   • Leo L. Duan, George Michailidis and Mingzhou Ding. Spiked Laplacian Graph. JMLR, 2022.
   • Leo L. Duan and David B. Dunson. Bayesian Distance Clustering. JMLR, 2021.

Selected Fundings and Awards

2023-2026 NSF Funding Award (PI)

2022 UF CLAS Faculty Travel Award

2022-2023 UFII SEED Funding Award

2021 UF Statistics Faculty Award for the Supervised Student (Maoran Xu)

2018 NeurIPS Bayesian Non-parametrics Award

2015 ASA Paper Competition Award in Section on Bayesian Statistical Science

2014 Woodside Foundation Award for Contribution in Biostatistics and Epidemiology Research

Recent and Upcoming Talks:

May 2023, Seminar Talk at Harvard University, Department of Biostatistics

January 2023, Seminar Talk at Texas A&M University, Department of Statistics

October 2022, International Conference on Bayesian Nonparametrics in Puerto Varas, Chile

Current and Former PhD students

Yaozhi Yang

Yu Zheng

Cheng Zeng

Eleni Dilma

Heejun Shin (Advised by Prof. Antonelli)

Maoran Xu (Graduated 2022)

Contact Info

PhD student interested in working with us? Send me an email! li dot duan at ufl dot edu

Publications

For the up-to-date list of publications and pre-prints, see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4i5UQLAAAAAJ&hl=en