Mu Zhu

Biography

Dr. Mu Zhuv is a professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada.

Research Interest

Mu's main research interests are statistical machine learning and multivariate analysis, with their applications in health informatics, bioinformatics, and data mining. He is currently working with his PhD students on problems having to do with transactional networks and protein structures. In recent years, his work has focused on efficient sparse kernel machines for unbalanced classification, ensemble approaches for variable selection, and algorithms for making personalized recommendations. Primarily an applied statistician, Mu has also made some theoretical contributions. For example, he was the first person to discover the theoretical difference between the forward and backward algorithms of projection pursuit. The two algorithms were previously thought to be equivalent, and their nontrivial difference remained unknown in the statistics community for more than fifteen years until the publication of Mu's work in what is widely regarded as the top theoretical journal in the field of mathematical statistics.