Hi, nice to meet you. I am Yu-En.
Yu-En, just like the United Nations (UN)!
I am an Operations Research Specialist at the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, providing technical expertise in program evaluation. With a focus on data quality, I collaborate with experts to standardise collection strategy and strengthen data integrity.
I was a Data Scientist at Ciba Health, using artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the quality of care. I worked with providers and health coaches to develop comprehensive approaches to personalise treatments and increase patient engagement.
My CV can be found here (it’s outdated, and I don’t have a motivation to update lately).
Research
I primarily work on machine learning for social policy and healthcare with microdata and administrative records. Currently, my interests are unstructured, non-traditional, and alternative data sources, such as remote sensor data and text files, nonparametric prediction methods, and unsupervised learning. Recent keywords include big data, satellite imagery, statistics, fairness, environment, ethics, and open data.
I obtained my Master in Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. At the time, I was an Ajello Fellow working with Dr. Pete Wilcoxen, studying energy policy in developing countries. I also worked as a research assistant at Open Data Watch where I reviewed gender-disaggregated data for SDG indicators and co-authored an article discussing the usability of national reporting platforms.
Here are some of my work:
Fun stuff (for me)
In my free time, I participate in Kaggle competitions, experiment with new Python and R packages, and spend days automating tasks I could have done in five minutes. Lately, I am obsessed with tidymodels, and I share my findings on Medium and here.
Hello!
An up-to-date list of states and territories of the United States to use in forms
Names and abbreviations of 50 states + 1 federal district + 5 territories in JSON array and object, updated in 2023
Predicting Use of Contraception in Asia with Machine Learning Algorithms
Using survey micro-data from the 6th MICS, I built classification models to predict the use of contraception from demographic and socio-economic factors. The report was finished in late 2020 for predictive analysis class in grad school.
Export Apple Health Data and Visualise with Tableau
As a long-term iPhone user with years of activity recordings and tons of free time during quarantine, I exported my Apple Health data, processed them in Python, and plugged them in Tableau Public to see how many steps I’ve taken daily from 2016 to 2020.
GreenBeans: Development Proposal for A More Sustainable World
Proposal submission to 2020 Geneva Challenge, a contest for graduate students to address the challenges of social inclusion. My team and I applied various evaluation approaches, such as needs assessment and theory of change, and had a great time putting what we learnt into practice.
Automate Data Collection with Selenium in Python
In this tutorial, I shared how I used Selenium to automate Google Chrome to collect data in Python. I needed to iterate through a date-picker day-by-day and a dropdown list as search criteria, click submit button, wait for result, and extract data from returned table. It may have taken longer to figure out the entire process than to just do it manually, but where’s the fun in that?
Caret vs Tidymodels: How to Use Both Packages for Machine Learning?
An example of building models with two popular packages together in R to predict bike sharing demand
Getting the Best Education: A Development Project Design
Development project proposal for improving the quality of early childhood education in Liberia
Cityline Syracuse: Exploratory Data Analysis with Python
Using Cityline and Census data, I examine and visualise income, education level, and resolve time distribution for trash related complaints.
About me
Hi, I am Yu-En (like the United Nations, UN). This is where I share my own work, findings, and random cool stuff I discovered. I also obsessively change the design, typography, and colour palette from time to time.