Dr Wenkai Xu

Summary

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics, University of Warwick. I am also affiliated with Foundations of Machine Learning System (FMLS) at University of Tuebingen, lead by Professor Robert Williamson. I am a visiting assistant professor at Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo. I am a member of ELLIS society.

Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Department of Statistics, University of Oxford, hosted by Professor Gesine Reinert. I did my Ph.D. in Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, supervised by Professor Arthur Gretton and Professor Aapo Hyvarinen.

Research topics

My research interests lie in the statistics and machine learning. Specifically, I work on hypothesis testing, comparing distributions, Stein's method, and network analysis. I am currently particularly interested in the notion of entropy and the connections between different axiomatic stands. My approach is through translation and transformations for better insights.

Statistical Machine Learning
Hypothesis Testing
Comparison of Experiments
Statistical Network Analysis and Modelling

Statistical Safeguarding

With colleagues from Warwick, Oxford, Edinburgh, Tokyo and Osaka, we run statistical safeguarding programme, a JST-UKRI funded Japan-UK collaboration on human centred AI.

We are hiring.

Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Statistics @ Department of Statistics, University of Oxford

Feel free to get in touch for additional information. And there will be additional research positions to open.

Research Team

If you are interested in working on various research topics with me, please get in touch to have a chat.

Current members:

Yunus Cobanoglu (PhD at Warwick, co-supervised with Matthew Thorpe)
Louis Meyer (PhD at Warwick)

Visiting members:

Yuting Tang (Postdoctoral Research at UTokyo)
Thanawat Lodkaew (PhD at UTokyo)
Ryusei Ishikawa (M2 at UTokyo)

Research visitors:

Yivan Zhang (Assistant Professor at UTokyo & RIKEN AIP)

Pre-doctoral students:

Aarav Agarwal (URSS student)
Elliott Redman (dissertation: conformal prediction with missing data)

Xianghe Zhu (MSc at Oxford, now PhD at LSE)
Wenqi Shi (UG research student, now PhD at Harvard)

Teaching

ST349 Machine Learning Framework

ST921 Statistical Frontiers

SC2 Probability and Statistics for Network Analysis (Oxford)

B8.4 Information Theory (Oxford)

Services

I serve as Area Chair for major machine learning conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR.

I serve as Associate Editor for Statistics and Computing.

I also review for Bernoulli, JMLR, EJS and Applied Probability Journals.

Together with Andy Wang, I will service as a Programme Manager for APTS from Autumn 2026.

Contact

Address:

Office MSB4.12

Department of Statistics
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
UK

Email:
firstname [dot] lastname @warwick.ac.uk

Office hour:

Monday 4:00-5:00pm on Term Time (after ST349 lecture). Office hour shall be pre-booked via email two days in advance. Due to high demand for answering ST349 enquires in Term2, personal tutees are to arrange meetings by email if needed.