Dr Mengchu Li BSc MASt PhD

Dr Mengchu Li

School of Mathematics
Assistant Professor

Contact details

Email
m.li.15@bham.ac.uk
View my research portal
Address
School of Mathematics
Watson Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dr Mengchu Li is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham. His research focuses on statistical theory and methodology for heterogeneous data analysis, especially in high-dimensional settings and under privacy constraints. Particular topics include change point analysis, transfer learning, robust statistics and differential privacy.

Personal webpage.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Statistics, University of Warwick, 2023.
  • MASt in Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge, 2019.
  • BSc in Mathematics and Economics, Durham University, 2018.

Biography

Dr Mengchu Li is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham. From February 2023 to Septemeber 2024, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics, University of Warwick. He obtained his PhD in Statistics at the University of Warwick in 2023.

Teaching

Semester 1

LM Foundations of Statistical Inference

Postgraduate supervision

Mengchu is interested in working with motivated students who share any of his research interests. Please get in touch via email.

Research

Research themes

  • Change point analysis
  • High-dimensional statistics
  • Robust statistics
  • Differential privacy

Research activity

Mengchu's research so far has been at the intersection of three areas: change point analysis, robust statistics and differential privacy, and he has mainly focused on developing statistical theories and methodologies. Mengchu studies problems under the minimax framework, which involves deriving information-theoretic lower bounds to understand the fundamental difficulty of the problems and developing specific algorithms that attain minimax optimality. In particular, his research unveils the fundamental costs of data contamination and privacy constraints in a variety of statistical problems, with a special focus on change point analysis.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Li, M, Berrett, T & Yu, Y 2023, 'On robustness and local differential privacy', The Annals of Statistics, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 717-737. https://doi.org/10.1214/23-AOS2267

Conference contribution

Li, M, Berrett, T & Yu, Y 2022, Network change point localisation under local differential privacy. in S Koyejo, S Mohamed, A Agarwal, D Belgrave, K Cho & A Oh (eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022). Advances in neural information processing systems, vol. 35, NeurIPS, pp. 15013-15026, 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022, New Orleans, United States, 28/11/22. <https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/hash/6111371a868af8dcfba0f96ad9e25ae3-Abstract-Conference.html>

Li, M & Yu, Y 2021, Adversarially robust change point detection. in M Ranzato, A Beygelzimer, Y Dauphin, PS Liang & JW Vaughan (eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021). Advances in neural information processing systems, vol. 34, NeurIPS, pp. 22955-22967, 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2021, Virtual, Online, 6/12/21. <https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2021/hash/c1e39d912d21c91dce811d6da9929ae8-Abstract.html>

Doctoral Thesis

Li, M 2023, 'Contributions to robustness, local differential privacy and change point analysis', ???thesis.qualification.phd???, University of Warwick. <https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/180986/>

View all publications in research portal