Li Ma
Assistant Professor of Statistical Science
Overview
Research in high-dimensional inference, nonparametric methods, Bayesian modeling, and biostatistics. Tackling statistical and computational challenges in analyzing big data. A recent focus of my research is on using multi-scale techniques to construct flexible probability models that can be applied to massive data sets. Traditional nonparametric approaches, while enjoying many established theoretical properties, are often computationally intractable for big data. Multi-scale inference provides a general framework for tackling the computational bottleneck, while preserving the theoretical guarantees enjoyed by classical methods.
Go to <a href="http://stat.duke.edu/~lm186/">my homepage</a> for the most up-to-date information.
Selected Grants
CAREER: Advances in multi-scale Bayesian inference and learning on massive data awarded by National Science Foundation (Principal Investigator). 2018 to 2023
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Training Program awarded by National Institutes of Health (Mentor). 2005 to 2021
Graphical multi-resolution scanning for cross-sample variation awarded by National Science Foundation (Principal Investigator). 2016 to 2019
Bayesian recursive partitioning and inference on the structure of high-dimensional distributions awarded by National Science Foundation (Principal Investigator). 2013 to 2016
Tang, Y, Ma, L, and Nicolaes, DL. "A phylogenetic scan test on a dirichlet-tree multinomial model for microbiome data." Annals of Applied Statistics 12.1 (March 1, 2018): 1-26. Full Text
Soriano, J, and Ma, L. "Probabilistic multi-resolution scanning for two-sample differences." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 79.2 (March 2017): 547-572. Full Text
Ma, L, and Soriano, J. "Efficient functional ANOVA through wavelet-domain Markov groves (Published online)." Journal of the American Statistical Association (2017).
Ma, L. "Recursive partitioning and multi-scale modeling on conditional densities." Electronic Journal of Statistics 11.1 (2017): 1297-1325. Full Text Open Access Copy
Ma, L. "Scalable Bayesian Model Averaging Through Local Information Propagation." Journal of the American Statistical Association 110.510 (April 3, 2015): 795-809. Full Text
Ma, L. "Adaptive Testing of Conditional Association Through Recursive Mixture Modeling." Journal of the American Statistical Association 108.504 (December 2013): 1493-1505. Full Text
Ma, L, Wong, WH, and Owen, AB. "A sparse transmission disequilibrium test for haplotypes based on Bradley-Terry graphs." Hum Hered 73.1 (2012): 52-61. Full Text
Ma, L, and Wong, WH. "Coupling optional pólya trees and the two sample problem." Journal of the American Statistical Association 106.496 (2011): 1553-1565. Full Text
Ma, L, Mease, D, and Russell, DM. "A four group cross-over design for measuring irreversible treatments on web search tasks." Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2011). Full Text
Ma, L, Stein, ML, Wang, M, Shelton, AO, Pfister, CA, and Wilder, KJ. "A method for unbiased estimation of population abundance along curvy margins." Environmetrics 22.3 (2011): 330-339. Full Text