Mathematics & Statistics Faculty and Staff

My research is in combinatorics on words, an area that lies at the border of mathematics and theoretical computer science. I am primarily interested in long strings over small alphabets — which patterns can be avoided and which must inevitably occur? I use a mix of mathematical proof and computation to establish new results related to pattern avoidance.

My research interest is in statistical machine learning, Bayesian statistical inference, and statistical ecology. The main focus of my research is in developing ensemble method to improve its prediction performance by exploiting the richness of useful variables in high-dimensional data to identify important models and variables, and therefore to answer important research question. I have shown applications of my methods in (i) drug discovery to detect drug like active bio-molecules for development and (ii) protein homology to detect homologous proteins and produce evolutionary sequences of proteins. These days, I am focusing more on developing Bayesian and computational models for ecology, health care, housing markets and genetics data.

Dr. Roger Yu is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Thompson Rivers University. He earned his PhD in Discrete Mathematics from Simon Fraser University and holds an MSc in Operations Research from Shandong University. His research interests include graph theory, discrete optimization, data science, and mathematical modeling.

Dr. Yu has been a faculty member at TRU since 1991 and a Full Professor since 2001. He currently serves as Director of the Centre for Optimization and Data Science and previously coordinated the MSc in Data Science program. In addition to his work at TRU, he has held adjunct and research appointments at universities in Canada, China, and Australia, including Simon Fraser University, Shandong University, Nankai University, and the University of Newcastle.

Outside of academia, Dr. Yu enjoys reading, travelling, playing badminton, and snow skiing.