Yan Chen

陈琰

Yan Chen
yc555@duke.edu
yan.chen@duke.edu

I'm Yan Chen, a 4th-year PhD student in Decision Sciences at Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, advised by Professor Alexandre Belloni. I obtained my Master in Statistics from Stanford University in 2018 and my Bachelor in Statistics from Nanjing University Department of Mathematics in 2016. I worked as a data scientist in industry from 2018 to 2022.

Research

Selected Preprints / Working Papers

Compound Estimation for Binomials
Yan Chen, Lihua Lei
Presented at CODE@MIT (Poster) 2025 · Causal Data Science Meeting 2025 (Spotlight) · 2025 Stanford Causal Science Center Conference (Poster)
arxiv

Adversarial Estimation of Assortment Probabilities under Independence Structure
Alexandre Belloni, Yan Chen, Matthew Harding
Presented at Joint Statistical Meetings 2025 · American Causal Inference Conference 2025 · California Econometrics Conference 2024 · Midwest Econometrics Group Conference 2024
arxiv| code

Testing Fairness with Utility Tradeoffs: A Wasserstein Projection Approach
Yan Chen, Zheng Tan, Jose Blanchet, Hanzhang Qin
arxiv

Market Design for Platform-Mediated Influencer Advertising
Yan Chen, Saša Pekeč
Presented at 2025 EC Frontiers of Online Advertising workshop (Spotlight) · 2025 MSOM main conference

Online Bin Packing with Load Balancing
Zheng Tan, Hanzhang Qin, Yan Chen, Lindong Liu, Yugang Yu
ssrn

Double Distributionally Robust Bid Shading for First Price Auctions
Yanlin Qu, Ravi Kant, Yan Chen, Brendan Kitts, San Gultekin, Aaron Flores, Jose Blanchet
arxiv

Publications

Optimal Downsampling for Imbalanced Classification with Generalized Linear Models
Yan Chen, Jose Blanchet, Krzysztof Dembczynski, Laura Fee Nern, Aaron Flores
AISTATS 2025 | International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
paper

Concurrent Reinforcement Learning with Aggregated States via Randomized Least Squares Value Iteration
Yan Chen, Qinxun Bai, Yiteng Zhang, Maria Dimakopoulou, Shi Dong, Qi Sun, Zhengyuan Zhou
ICML 2025 | International Conference on Machine Learning
paper

Society of Agents: Regret Bounds of Concurrent Thompson Sampling
Yan Chen, Perry Dong, Qinxun Bai, Maria Dimakopoulou, Wei Xu, Zhengyuan Zhou
NeurIPS 2022 | Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
paper

Talks

Invited Discussant, International Seminar on Selective Inference — Discussion of Prof. Nikos Ignatiadis' talk
January 2026 · Online
video
2025 Stanford Causal Science Center Conference (poster)
November 2025 · Stanford, CA
2025 Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE) @ MIT (poster)
November 2025 · Cambridge, MA
2025 Causal Data Science Meeting
November 2025 · Online
2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting
October 2025 · Atlanta, GA
2025 Joint Statistical Meetings
August 2025 · Nashville, TN
2025 Revenue Management and Pricing Conference
July 2025 · Columbia University, NYC
2025 American Causal Inference Conference
May 2025 · Detroit, MI
Midwest Econometrics Group Conference 2024
November 2024 · Lexington, KY
2024 INFORMS Annual Meeting
October 2024 · Seattle, WA
2024 California Econometrics Conference
September 2024 · UC Davis, CA
INFORMS Annual Meeting
October 2023 · Phoenix, AZ
Yahoo Research Seminar — Towards Improving Efficiency in Yahoo's Predictive Approaches
August 2023 · Online
NeurIPS 2022 Poster Session
November 2022 · New Orleans, LA
INFORMS Annual Meeting
October 2022 · Indianapolis, IN

Teaching

Head TA (Fall 2025) — DEC-546: Modern Analytics: Data, Prediction and Actions
Master of Quantitative Management, Fuqua School of Business
Instructor (Summer 2024) — Math Summer Camp for Fuqua PhD
Teaching evaluation: 5.0 / 5.0
TA (Spring 2024) — Univ 103: Let's Talk About Digital You: A Technical and Ethical Exploration of a Data-Centric World
Duke Undergraduate
Head TA (Fall 2024) — DEC-546: Modern Analytics: Data, Prediction and Actions
Master of Quantitative Management, Fuqua School of Business
Head TA (Fall 2023) — DEC-546: Modern Analytics: Data, Prediction and Actions
Master of Quantitative Management, Fuqua School of Business

Activities

Co-chair, International Student Affairs under Duke Graduate and Professional Student Government
Fall 2022 – Spring 2023
PhD Representative, Duke Graduate School EIS (English for International Students) Working Group
Appointed by Associate Dean for Graduate Programs · Fall 2023 – Spring 2024