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Zijian Guo

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Zijian Guo

About me

I am a Qiushi Chair Professor (求是讲席教授) in the Center for Data Science at Zhejiang University. I received my B.S. in Mathematics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012 and my Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professor T. Tony Cai (COPSS Award laureate). From 2017 to 2025, I served on the faculty of the Department of Statistics at Rutgers University, advancing from Assistant Professor to tenured Associate Professor, before returning to China to join Zhejiang University in 2025.
“Qiushi” literally means “seeking truth,” echoing Zhejiang University’s motto “Seeking Truth and Pursuing Innovation.”

[Google Scholar] [arXiv] [Github]

Research

I am broadly interested in causal inference, high-dimensional statistics, multi-source and transfer learning, distributionally robust optimization, non-regular statistical inference, and statistical methods at the interface of optimization and statistics. A substantial part of my work focuses on robust learning and inference under heterogeneity and distribution shift, with applications in health and genetics.
My works are published in the Annals of Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, Cell Genomics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Biometrika, Journal of Machine Learning Research, and the Journal of Econometrics. I currently serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (Theory and Methods) and TEST.

Recruitment

I am looking for highly motivated students with strong backgrounds in programming and mathematcis and interests in statistics, optimization, and AI for science.

Education

Selected Publications

underline indicates supervised students ; # indicates equal contribution; * indicates alphabetical ordering ; ✉ indicates corresponding authorship.

  1. * Cai, T. T. and  Guo, Z. (2017).
    Confidence Intervals for High-Dimensional Linear Regression: Minimax Rates and Adaptivity.
    The Annals of Statistics, 45(2), 615-646. [Codes]

  2. Guo, Z., Kang, H., Cai, T. T. and Small, D. S. (2018).
    Confidence Intervals for Causal Effects with Invalid Instruments using Two-Stage Hard Thresholding with Voting.
    Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, 80(4), 793-815. [Codes]

  3. Guo, Z. , Cevid, D., and Bühlmann, P. (2022).
    Doubly Debiased Lasso: High-Dimensional Inference under Hidden Confounding.
    Annals of Statistics, 50 (3), 1320 - 1347. [Codes]

  4. Guo, Z. (2023).
    Causal Inference with Invalid Instruments: Post-selection Problems and A Solution Using Searching and Sampling.
    Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology), 85(3), 959-985. [Codes]

  5. Guo, Z. (2024).
    Statistical Inference for Maximin Effects: Identifying Stable Associations across Multiple Studies .
    Journal of the American Statistical Association, 119(547), 1968-1984. [Codes]

  6. Yao, M., Miller, G., Vardarajan, B., Baccarelli, A., Guo, Z.✉,and Liu, Z. ✉(2024+).
    Robust Mendelian Randomization Analysis by Automatically Selecting Valid Genetic Instruments with Applications to Identify Plasma Protein Biomarkers for Alzheimer’s Disease.  
    Cell Genomics, to appear.

  7. Wang, Z.#, Hu, Y.#, Bühlmann, P., and Guo, Z.(2024).
    Causal Invariance Learning via Efficient Optimization of a Nonconvex Objective
    Technical Report

  8. Guo, Z., Wang, Z., Hu, Y., and Bach, F.(2025).
    Statistical Inference for Conditional Group Distributionally Robust Optimization with Cross-Entropy Loss
    Technical Report

  9. Zheng, M., Bonvini, M.✉,and Guo, Z.✉(2025).
    Perturbed Double Machine Learning: Nonstandard Inference Beyond the Parametric Length
    Technical Report

  10. Koo, T. and Guo, Z. (2025).
    Distributionally Robust Synthetic Control: Ensuring Robustness Against Highly Correlated Controls and Weight Shifts.
    Technical Report

Honors and Awards

  • ICSA Outstanding Young Researcher Award, 2023.

  • Honorary mention for Bernoulli Society New Researcher Award, 2023.

  • ICSA New Researcher Award, ICSA International Conference, 2019.

  • IMS travel Award, JSM 2017.

  • President Gutmann Leadership Award, University of Pennsylvania, 2017.

  • J. Parker Brusk Prize, 2016.

  • Section in Epidemiology Young Investigator Award, JSM 2013.

Contact

Center for Data Science
Zhejiang University
No. 866,Yuhangtang Road
Email: zijguo@zju.edu.cn