Vincent Guan
Department of Mathematics , University of British Columbia
Email: vguan23@math.ubc.ca
I am an applied math PhD student at the University of British Columbia (UBC), working under the supervision of Dr. Elina Robeva. I began my PhD program in September 2023.
I completed a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy at UBC from September 2017-April 2020. I also completed a MSc in mathematics at UBC from September 2020-April 2022, under the superivision of Dr. Juncheng Wei and Dr. Mathav Murugan. From October 2022-September 2023, I was a graduate researcher at the Computational Privacy Group at Imperial College London working under the supervision of Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye.
I like randomness, and as luck would have it, I research it for a living. I am most interested in stochastic systems, with a focus on causal inference from time series data. I work on theoretical and applied problems, including:
how to model dynamical systems in biology (e.g. single-cell genomics data) and climate sciences
proving necessary and sufficient conditions for the identifiability of dynamical systems from observational data
methods for estimating parametric models from observational data (e.g. SDE parameter estimation)
I am broadly interested in probability theory and information theory, with previous research in data aggregation, synthetic data generation, and feature importance for data explanation. My project repositories are available on my github: https://github.com/guanton
Guan, V., Janssen, J., Rahmani, H., Warren, A., Zhang, S., Robeva, E., & Schiebinger, G. (2024). Identifying Drift, Diffusion, and Causal Structure from Temporal Snapshots. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.22729.
Guan, V., Guépin, F., Cretu, A.-M., & de Montjoye, Y.-A. (2024). A Zero Auxiliary Knowledge Membership Inference Attack on Aggregate Location Data. Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol., 2024(4)
Janssen, J., Guan, V., & Robeva, E. (2023, April). Ultra-marginal feature importance: Learning from data with causal guarantees. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (pp. 10782-10814). PMLR.