Letian Yang

Welcome! I am Letian, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Data Sciences and Operations (DSO) at the University of Southern California (USC). I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Dennis Shen in the statistics group.

Before joining USC Marshall, I received my bachelor’s degree in statistics from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech).

“We do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its cause.” — Aristotle

I believe the world is shaped by causal forces, and I am committed to understanding their structure through rigorous statistical methodology. Modern datasets are vast and deeply informative; statistical models distill the patterns they contain and illuminate the mechanisms that govern real systems. When principled modeling meets domain knowledge, data cease to be mere observations: they become evidence of how and why things happen.

Guided by this perspective, my research and career interests lie at the intersection of causal inference and high-dimensional statistical modeling.