When Statistics Embraces A.I.

Xiao Wang

Head, Department of Statistics · J.O. Berger and M.E. Bock Professor of Statistics

College of Science, Purdue University · West Lafayette, Indiana

Fellow, ASA Fellow, IMS Associate Editor, JASA Associate Editor, Technometrics

Curriculum Vitae  → Short Bio wangxiao@purdue.edu

Math 218, West Lafayette
(765) 496-7574

Research

Statistical foundations for modern machine learning

My group develops theory, methodology and algorithms at the meeting point of statistics and artificial intelligence — generalization theory for deep networks, generative modelling and sampling, functional and high-dimensional data, and the reliability of learned systems in science and medicine.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Nonparametric Statistics
• Functional Data Analysis
• Reliability

Explore research projects  →

Education

• 2005Ph.D. in Statistics
  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
• 2000M.S. in Mathematics
  University of Science and Technology of China
• 1997B.S. in Mathematics
  University of Science and Technology of China

Courses Taught

• STAT 695Deep Learning
• STAT 598Statistical Machine Learning
• STAT 528Mathematical Statistics
• STAT 517Mathematical Statistics and its Applications
• STAT 516Probability and its Applications
• STAT 417Statistical Theory
• STAT 416Probability

News

What’s New

Recent papers, defenses and honours from the group.

2026

• May 26, 2026Paper
  Yijia Liu and Hyeong Jin Chun’s paper “Regularized Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Parameter Estimation in Differential Equation Models” is accepted by Technometrics.
• May 10, 2026Paper
  Huiming Xie’s paper “Transition dynamics modeling of pre-trained accelerometry representations for time to diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease” is accepted by Lifetime Data Analysis — joint work with Fei Xue.

2025

• Nov 25, 2025Paper
  Halin Shin’s paper “Clustered Temporal Decomposition for High-Dimensional Data” is accepted by JABES.
• Nov 13, 2025Defense
  Huiming Xie successfully defended her thesis — congratulations, Dr. Xie!
• Nov 6, 2025Defense
  Chuanhui Liu successfully defended his thesis — congratulations, Dr. Liu!
• Oct 24, 2025Defense
  Haoyun Yin successfully defended his thesis — congratulations, Dr. Yin!
• Sep 18, 2025Paper
  Chuanhui and Haoyun’s paper “Theoretical Perspectives on Knowledge Distillation: A Review” is accepted by WIREs Computational Statistics.
• Jul 21, 2025Defense
  Hyeong Jin Hyun successfully defended his thesis — congratulations, Dr. Hyun!
• Jun 27, 2025Paper
  Hyeong Jin Hyun’s paper “Neural Conformal Inference for Jump Diffusion Processes” is accepted by the Journal of Econometrics.
• May 1, 2025Paper
  Chuanhui’s paper “Censor Dependent Variational Inference” is accepted by ICML.
• Feb 12, 2025Paper
  Haoyun and Yixuan’s paper “Wasserstein Coreset via Sinkhorn Loss” is accepted by TMLR.
• Jan 14, 2025Paper
  Chuanhui’s paper “Double Robust Conditional VAE via Decode Calibration: An Implicit KL Annealing Approach” is accepted by TMLR.
• Jan 8, 2025Paper
  Hyeong Jin Hyun’s paper “Fast Cost-Constrained High Dimensional Regression” is accepted by Statistica Sinica.

2024

• Dec 3, 2024Paper
  Jungeum Kim’s paper “Inductive Global and Local Manifold Approximation and Projection” is accepted by TMLR.
• Sep 14, 2024Paper
  Qingyi Gao and Yixuan Qiu’s paper “Adaptive Learning of the Latent Space of Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks” is accepted by JASA.
• Apr 26, 2024Paper
  Yijia Liu’s paper “Implicit Generative Prior for Bayesian Neural Networks” is accepted by AOAS.
• Apr 11, 2024Defense
  Yijia Liu successfully defended her thesis — congratulations!
• March 2024Honour
  Xiao Wang is named J.O. Berger and M.E. Bock Professor of Statistics.

2023

• May 18, 2023Paper
  “Partial Conditioning for Inference of Many-Normal-Means with Hölder Constraints”, with Jiasen Yang and Chuanhai Liu, is accepted by the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning.
• May 16, 2023Honour
  Hyeong Jin Hyun’s paper is selected as one of five papers for Honorable Mention in the student paper competition at the ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, Ann Arbor, June 11–14, 2023.
• 2023Honour
  Xiao Wang is awarded the Professional Achievement Award, College of Science, Purdue University.
• 2023Honour
  Yijia Liu wins the 2023 William J. Studden Publication Award, Department of Statistics, Purdue University.
• Feb 1, 2023Paper
  The paper with Yixuan Qiu, “Efficient Multimodal Sampling via Tempered Distribution Flow”, is accepted by JASA.
• Jan 20, 2023Honour
  Hyeong Jin Hyun’s paper on neural inference wins the 2023 JSM Best Paper Award, Business & Economics section.

2022

• Fall 2022Paper
  A new course on Statistical Machine Learning (STAT 598) will be offered in Fall 2022. A draft syllabus is available.
• May 24, 2022Defense
  Jungeum Kim successfully completed her final defense. Thesis: “Bridging the gap between human and computer vision: Adversarial and manifold learning for high-dimensional data”.
• May 3, 2022Paper
  Jungeum Kim’s paper “Robust Sensible Adversarial Learning of Deep Neural Networks for Image Classification” is accepted by AOAS.

2021

• Nov 29, 2021Paper
  “Functional Finite Mixture Regression Models” is accepted by Statistica Sinica — joint work with Leo Yu-Feng Liu and Hongtu Zhu.
• Sep 8, 2021Paper
  Yao Chen and Qingyi Gao’s paper “Inferential Wasserstein GANs” is accepted by JRSS-B.
• Jul 6, 2021Paper
  Yijia Liu’s paper “A Nonlinear Sparse Neural ODE Model for Multiple Functional Processes” is accepted by CJS.
• Apr 13, 2021Honour
  Xiao Wang is elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA).
• Apr 6, 2021Honour
  Xiao Wang is elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).
• Jan 18, 2021Paper
  Qingyi’s paper “Theoretical Investigation of Generalization Bounds for Adversarial Learning for Deep Neural Networks” is accepted by JSTP.

2020

• Dec 15, 2020Paper
  “High-Dimensional Spatial Quantile Function-on-Scalar Regression” is accepted by JASA.
• Dec 2020Paper
  Yixi’s paper “Weight Normalized Deep Neural Networks” is accepted by Stat.
• Sep 2020Paper
  Jiapeng’s paper “Cross-Lingual Document Retrieval with Smooth Learning” is accepted by COLING 2020.
• Aug 2020Paper
  Yao and Qingyi’s paper “Deep Feature Selection via Deep Neural Networks” is accepted by JCGS — winner of the 2019 ASA SLDS Student Paper Award.

2019

• Nov 15, 2019Paper
  Yixuan Qiu’s paper “Stochastic Approximate Gradient Descent via the Langevin Algorithm” is accepted by AAAI 2020.
• Oct 27, 2019Paper
  Yixi Xu’s paper “Sparse Deep Neural Networks using L_1,∞ Weight Normalization” is accepted by Statistica Sinica.
• Oct 21, 2019Paper
  Yixuan Qiu’s paper “ALMOND: Adaptive Latent Modeling and Optimization via Neural Networks and Langevin Diffusion” is accepted by JASA.
• May 2019Paper
  “Theoretical Investigation of Generalization Bound for Residual Networks” is accepted by IJCAI 2019.
• Feb 2019Paper
  “D-CCA: A Decomposition-based Canonical Correlation Analysis for High-Dimensional Datasets” is accepted by JASA.
• Jan 15, 2019Honour
  Yao Chen’s paper “Nonlinear Variable Selection via Deep Neural Networks” is named winner of the 2019 SLDS Student Paper Award.

2018

• Sep 5, 2018Paper
  Yixi Xu’s paper “Understanding Weight Normalized Deep Neural Networks with Rectified Linear Units” is accepted at NeurIPS 2018.
• Sep 5, 2018Paper
  Yao Chen’s paper “Classification of short single lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for atrial fibrillation detection using piecewise linear spline and XGBoost” is accepted in Physiological Measurement.