Education

2016.08-2021.05，Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, National University of Singapore, PhD

2012.09-2016.06，School of Mathematical Sciences，Nankai University，Bachelor

Work Experience

2022.09 till now，School of Statistics, Renmin University of China, Assistant Professor

2021.07-2022.08，ByteDance, R&D-Algorithm

Research Interests

High-dimensional data analysis, variable selection, dimension reduction, machine learning, theory and application of generative AI

Funding

1. Sufficient Dimension Reduction for High-dimensional Data with Different Constraints, NSFC, 12401375, Leader, 2025-2027

2. Nonparametric Sufficient Dimension Reduction and its Application in Classification, RUC, 23XNKJ06, Leader, 2023-2025

Educational Reform Project

1. Innovation for course advanced algebra in the era of data, theory and application, RUC, Participant, 2024-2025

Publications

1. Cai, Z., Xia, Y., & Hang, W. (2023), "An outer-product-of-gradient approach to dimension reduction and its application to classification in high dimensional space", Journal of the American Statistical Association, 118(543), 1671-1681.

2. Liu, Y., Qin, X., & Cai, Z.* (2025), "A tree approach for variable selection and its random forest", Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, 202, 108068.

3. Zhang, A., Sheng, L., Cai, Z.*, Wang, X., & Chua, T. S. (2023). "Empowering collaborative filtering with principled adversarial contrastive loss." In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. New Orleans, Dec 10-16, 2023.

4. Hu, G., Zhang, A., Liu, S., Cai, Z.*, Yang, X., & Wang, X. (2025). AlphaFuse: Learn ID Embeddings for Sequential Recommendation in Null Space of Language Embeddings. In International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Padua, Italy. July 13-17, 2025.

Teaching

1. Undergraduate, Advanced Algebra

2. Postgraduate, Main Literature Study