Shu-Chuan (Grace) Chen 
Assistant Professor of Statistics

439 PSA, School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287
Email: scchen@math.asu.edu
Phone: PSA 439 -- (480) 965-6639

Office hours: 9:00-11:30am Tuesday, or by appointment (PSA 439)

Principal Areas of Teaching and Research:

Dr. Chen's research mainly focuses on bioinformatics, especially in developing statistical methods and algorithms for functional genomic data.  Her research interests are in the following fields.

• Phylogeny Program:  MixtureTree v1.0 by Chen, Rosenberg, and Lindsay.

• Genometrics:   It is to understand the genome functions of difference species. The term "genometrics" is invented by Dr. Bruce Lindsay at Penn State.

• Mixture Models: The descendant's DNA population is a mixture of parental DNA populations.

• Data Mining: Our focus is to apply association rules which traditionally come from market basket analysis to microarray data with the intent to find descriptive and predictive biological processes.

• Neuron Spike Trend Study: To understand potential encoding mechanism of motor cortical neurons for control commands during reach-to-grasp movements, experiments to record neuronal activities have been conducted in many research laboratories. We propose to consider neural firing counts and temporal intervals respectively and apply intergrated Poisson Regression model to categorize different neural activities.

Dr. Chen's past publications involved with the development of mixture models for clustering high dimensional sequences, its related theoretical justifications and applications.  She also published papers in analysis of election data and DNA sequences' matching probability.

Selected Publications:

• Chen, S. C., Li, L. A., Shen, L., and He, J. (2010) Influence of choices of statistical models on neural spike trend, Journal of Data Science. (In press)

• Chen, S. C., Li, M., Rosenberg, M., and Lindsay, B. (2010) Mixture tree construction and its applications. Book chapter in Handbook of Computational Statistics: Statistical Bioinformatics, edited by H. S. Lu, B. Schölkopf, and H. Zhao, Springer-Verlag (In press)

• Lindsay, B., Markatou M., Ray, S., Yang, K., and Chen, S. C. (2008). Quadratic distances on probabilities: the foundations, The Annals of Statistics, Vol. 36, No. 2, 983-1006.

• Wilson, J. R., and Chen, S. C. (2007) Dirichlet-multinomial Model with varying rates over time, Journal of Data Science, 5(2), 413-423.

• Chen, S.C., and Lindsay, B.  (2006) Building mixture trees from binary sequence data, Biometrika, 93(4), 843-860.

• Chen, S.C. (2004). Election Study: A mathematical model for recounting. Journal of the Chinese Statistical Association. Vol. 42, No 3, pp 277-287.

• Fu, J.C., Lou, W. Y.W., and Chen, S.C. (1999). On the probability of pattern matching in non-aligned DNA sequences: a finite Markov chain imbedding approach. pp287-302, Book chapter in Scan Statistics and Applications, J. Glaz and N. Balashrinan, Birkhauser.

Other Information:

 Statistics Seminar

Last updated September 25, 2010.