PhD Student Lu Zhang Receives the 2022 SLDS Student Paper Award

Graduating PhD Student Lu Zhang won the 2022 Statistical Learning and Data Science (SLDS) Student Paper Award for her paper entitled “Floodgate: Inference for Model-Free Variable Importance” and presented it at the SLDS section in JSM 2022.  This paper was co-authored with her PhD advisor, Assistant Professor Lucas Janson, and proposes a new inferential approach called floodgate.  Her slides are available on the JSM online program page. Floodgate can leverage any working regression function chosen by the user to construct asymptotic confidence bounds, and it applies to a model-free measure of variable importance called the minimum mean squared error gap.