I am currently a tenure-track associate researcher (副研究员) at School of Mathematics at Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. Previously, I was a postdoctoral scholar at Department of Computational Medicine, UCLA, working with Dr. Kenneth Lange and Dr. Hua Zhou. Prior to that, I received my Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, where I primarily worked with Dr. Eric C. Chi. My work sits at the intersection of statistical methodology, numerical optimization, and computational genomics.

Undergraduate and graduate students at Southeast University interested in doing a thesis with me are welcome to email me at heng.qiang6@gmail.com.

📝 Preprints & In Preparation

Discovering Heterogeneous Associations with Smoothed Quantile Regression and Saddle Point Approximation

Qiang Heng, Wenjian Bi, Xiang Zhan

In Preparation

Sparse Quantile Regression at the Biobank Scale

Qiang Heng, Xiang Zhan

In Preparation

Improved Statistical Analysis for Spectral Algorithms under General Conditions: Optimality and Robustness

Caixing Wang, Qiang Heng, Qi Kuang, Xingdong Feng

Under Review

Inertial Quadratic Majorization Minorization with Application to Kernel Regularized Learning

Qiang Heng, Caixing Wang

Under Review

Tactics for Improving Least Squares

Qiang Heng, Hua Zhou, Kenneth Lange

Under Review

📝 Selected Publications

JCGS

A Stability Framework for Parameter Selection in the Minimum Covariance Determinant Problem

Qiang Heng, Hui Shen, Kenneth Lange

Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics (2025+)

• [paper][code][arXiv]

Tech

Robust Low-rank Tensor Decomposition with the L2 Criterion

Qiang Heng, Eric C. Chi, Yufeng Liu

Technometrics, 2023

• [paper][code][arXiv]

JCGS

Bayesian Trend Filtering via Proximal Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Qiang Heng, Hua Zhou, Eric C. Chi

Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 2023

• [paper][code][arXiv]

📝 Other Publications

• Anderson Accelerated Operator Splitting Methods for Convex-nonconvex Regularized Problems [paper][code] Qiang Heng, Xiaoqian Liu, Eric C. Chi. IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, 2025.

• Bootstrap Estimation of the Proportion of Outliers in Robust Regression Models [paper][code] Qiang Heng, Kenneth Lange. Statistics and Computing, 2025.

• Proximal MCMC for Bayesian Inference of Constrained and Regularized Estimation [paper] Xinkai Zhou, Qiang Heng, Eric C. Chi, Hua Zhou. The American Statistician, 2024.

• FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning [arXiv] Yidong Wang, Hao Chen, Qiang Heng, Wenxin Hou, Yue Fan, Zhen Wu, Jindong Wang, Marios Savvides, Takahiro Shinozaki, Bhiksha Raj, Bernt Schiele, Xing Xie. The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023).

📖 Educations

• 2019.08 - 2023.12, Ph.D. Statistics, North Carolina State University.
• 2015.09 - 2019.06, B.S. Statistics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.