I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at University of California Irvine. I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Statistics at North Carolina State University (NCSU), co-advised by Dr. Wenbin Lu and Dr. Rui Song. Prior to that, I obtained a B.S. in Statistics from Zhejiang University in July 2017.
I have broad research interests in methodology and theory in causal inference, reinforcement learning, graphical model, and their interchanges, to establish reliable, powerful, and interpretable solutions to wide real-world problems. Currently, my main research work includes individualized optimal decision making with complex data, policy evaluation in reinforcement/deep learning, and causal discovery for high-dimensional individual mediation analysis, directly motivated by precision medicine, customized economics, personalized marketing, modern epidemiology, etc.
Click here for my name in Chinese and how to pronounce it. Contact me: hengrc1@uci.edu
- Causal Inference and Causal Structure Learning
- Reinforcement Learning and Bandits
- Natural Language Processing and Explainable Deep Learning
- Precision Medicine
-
PhD in Statistics, 2022
North Carolina State University
-
B.S. in Statistics, 2017
Zhejiang University
News
-
Oct to Dec 2023: I will present my works at INFORMS Annual Meeting, CMStatistics, ICSDS.
-
Sept 2023: Our paper On Learning Necessary and Sufficient Causal Graphs is accepted at NeurIPS 2023 as a spotlight!
-
Sept 2023: Our paper Doubly Robust Interval Estimation for Optimal Policy Evaluation in Online Learning is accepted at Journal of the American Statistical Association.
-
May to Sep 2023: I shared my recent works at ICSA, RUC IFS, JSM, EcoSta, Stat@UofWaterloo, PCIC.
-
April 2023: Our paper Towards Trustworthy Explanation: On Causal Rationalization is accepted at ICML 2023. Congrats to my student Wenbo Zhang and collaborators!
-
April 2023: Our paper On Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Heterogeneous Causal Graphs is accepted at ICML 2023.
-
Jan to April 2023: I shared my recent works at RL+X Seminar, BrownBag Seminar, CS@UCSB, Stat@SDSU, CS@UCI.
-
Jan 2023: Our paper Jump Q-Learning for Individualized Decision Making with Continuous Treatments is published at Journal of Machine Learning Research.
Awards and Honors
- The Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) Research Award, University of California Irvine, 2023
- Academic Senate Council on Research, Computing and Libraries (CORCL) Award, University of California Irvine, 2023
- Amazon Web Services Cloud Research Award, Amazon, 2022
- ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award, The International Biometric Society, 2020
- Nominated for the Outstanding TA Award, NCSU, 2019 and 2021
- Mu Sigma Rho, National Statistics Honor Society, NCSU, 2017 - Present
- National Undergraduate Research Fund, 2017
- Meritorious Winner in American Mathematical Contest, 2016
Selected Publications
(* co-first author, ___ graduate student)
-
Cai, H., Wang, Y., Jordan, M., & Song, R. (2023). On Learning Necessary and Sufficient Causal Graphs. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
-
Shen, Y. *, Cai, H. *, & Song, R. (2023). Doubly Robust Interval Estimation for Optimal Policy Evaluation in Online Learning. Journal of the American Statistical Association.
-
Zhang, W., Wu, T., Wang, Y., Cai, Y., & Cai, H. (2023) Towards Trustworthy Explanation: On Causal Rationalization. In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023).
-
Watson, RA. *, Cai, H. *, An, X., McLean, S., & Song, R. (2023). On Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Heterogeneous Causal Graphs. In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023).
-
Cai, H. *, Shi, C. *, Song, R., & Lu, W. (2023). Jump Q-Learning for Individualized Decision Making with Continuous Treatments. Journal of Machine Learning Research.
-
Cai, H., Lu, W., Marceau West R., Mehrotra DV., & Huang, L. (2022). CAPITAL: Optimal Subgroup Identification via Constrained Policy Tree Search. Statistics in Medicine.
-
Cai, H. *, Shi, C *., Song, R., & Lu, W. (2021). Deep Jump Learning for Off-Policy Evaluation in Continuous Treatment Settings. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
-
Cai, H., Song, R., & Lu, W. (2021). ANOCE: Analysis of Causal Effects with Multiple Mediators via Constrained Structural Learning. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
-
Cai, H., Lu, W., & Song, R. (2020). On Validation and Planning of An Optimal Decision Rule with Application in Healthcare Studies. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Some Preprints
-
Cai, H., Lu, W., & Song, R. (2023+). CODA: Calibrated Optimal Decision Making with Multiple Data Sources and Limited Outcome. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.10554.
-
Ma, T., Cai, H., Qi, Z., Shi, C., & Laber, E. B. (2023+). Sequential Knockoffs for Variable Selection in Reinforcement Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.14281.
-
Shen, Y., Wan, R., Cai, H., & Song, R. (2023+). Heterogeneous Synthetic Learner for Panel Data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.14580.
-
Price, K.+, Cai, H., Shen, W., & Hu, G. (2022+). How much does Home Field Advantage matter in Soccer Games? A causal inference approach for English Premier League analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.07193.
Advisees
- Wenbo Zhang (Ph.D. Student)
- Shih Ting Huang (Master Student)
- Louis Chu (Undergraduate Student)
- Guanchen Wu (Undergraduate Student)
- Miya Wang (Undergraduate Student)
- Wang Ma (Undergraduate Student)
Teaching
University of California Irvine (2022-)
Instructor:
- STATS 120C/281C: Introduction to Probability and Statistics III (Spring 2023, two sections)
North Carolina State University (Prior to 2022)
Lab Instructor:
- ST 703: Statistical Methods I (Fall 2019)
- ST 114: Introduction to Statistical Programming - Python (Spring 2022)
Teaching Fellow:
- ST 422: Introduction to Mathematical Statistics II (Fall 2021)
- ST 745: Analysis of Survival Data (Spring 2021)
- ST 405/505: Applied Nonparametric Statistics (Fall 2020)
- ST 311: Introduction to Statistics (Spring 2019)
- ST 790: Financial Statistics (Fall 2018)
- ST 312: Introduction to Statistics II (Spring 2018)
- ST 511: Introduction to Statistics for Biological Sciences (Fall 2018)
- ST 350: Economic and Business Statistics (Fall 2017)
Contact
- hengrc1@uci.edu
- Bren Hall 2224, Irvine, CA 92697