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Yu Yang

Ph.D. student in Statistics

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Statistics. I am always hungry to learn. I am interested in deep learning and my major focus is on Natural Language Processing.

My motto is: Respect Life!

Featured Projects

Here are some selected projects that I have done. More projects can be found at my Github.

PGNet + Text RBM

Topic-Aware Text Summarization

This is a demo project to investigate the effectiveness of using text RBM to insert topic information to summarization models.

Github repo Final report Slides
squad retro-reader

Retro-BiDAF: A Retrospective Reader Over BiDAF

For the SQuAD 2.0 Challenge, I combined the idea of retrospective reading and BiDAF and proposed the Retro-BiDAF model, which improved both the EM and F1 score in the non-PCE scenario.

Github repo Final report Slides
lyft motion prediction

Kaggle: Lyft Motion Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles

This Kaggle competition was supported by Lyft and the goal was to build a motion prediction model for self-driving vehicles. We built an ensembled model with ResNet, DenseNet, and EfficientNet, and ranked top 6% in the end.

Github repo
wells fargo grand prize winner

Wells Fargo Campus Analytics Challenge 2020

This challenge was a binary classification problem. Our shiny point was the proposal of a novel method called Sparse Grouping Pursuit to discover the sparseness and grouping structure among features, which led to a tremendous dimension reduction. Our solution was selected as one of the Grand Prize Winners of the year.

Github repo Final report
minnemudac analytic acumen award

MinneMUDAC 2019 Student Data Science Challenge

The objective of this challenge was to predict soybean price in the commodity market. Our work was highly regarded by the judges in both academia and industry. And we won the Analytic Acumen Award in the end.

Github repo Blog post More about the project
Kaggle competition

Kaggle: Travelers Claim Fraud Detection

This was an in-class project supported by Travelers. The goal was to detect claim fraud. Our team won 2nd place.

Github repo Blog post

Experience

Research Assistant

Seagate Technology

Sep. 2019 - present

I have been working as a research assistant on projects collaborating with Seagate since 2019 Fall.

Teaching Assistant

University of Minnesota

Sep. 2018 - May 2019

I worked as a teaching assistant for the course STAT 3011 Introduction to Statistical Analysis for two semesters.

Education

University of Minnesota - Minneapolis, USA

Ph.D. in Statistics, 2018 - present

I am now working on Natural Language Processing.

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics - Shanghai, China

B.S. in Statistics, 2014 - 2018

I had a great time during my undergraduate. I played softball in the college and I miss my teammates and the training time on the fields so much!