Yaxuan (Sean) Zhang
PhD Candidate at UMN | MGIS Student | Computer Science Minor
University of Minnesota
About Me
I am a Ph.D. candidate and MGIS student (Computer Science minor) at the University of Minnesota. With over 5 years of quantitative experience and multi-disciplinary collaborations, I am passionate about applying analytics techniques to deliver data-driven transportation decision-making solutions.
Specialties: Transportation Analysis & Planning, GIS, Statistical Modeling, Machine Learning, Analytics, R, Python, SQL
- Transportation Planning
- Geospatial Data Science
- Statistics & ML
Ph.D. in Geography (GIS), 05/2024
University of Minnesota
M.S. in Geographic Information Science, 2024
University of Minnesota
BEng in Geographic Information Science, 2018
Wuhan Univeristy, China
Experience
- Led a data collection process, designing surveys and collecting GPS travel data from 1000+ participants.
- Applied data mining and statistical models to study gender discrepancies in mobility patterns to promote social equity.
- Designed an interpretable Machine Learning algorithm to model health disparities related to mobility behaviors.
- Delivered a recommendation report to external stakeholders (MnDOT) to inform policy-making decisions.
- Designed an ETL pipeline to fetch, clean, and process real-time traffic data into a web dynamic map dashboard.
- Implemented a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) for traffic volume forecasting.
- Conducted QAQC, exploratory analysis, and visualization for transit data and delivered insights to internal stakeholders.
- Designed a data-driven framework to solve spatiotemporal quality issues in GPS mobility data, improving 25% accuracy.
- Adopted ML and trajectory analysis to identify human travel behaviors and measure person-based accessibility space.
- Created an R pipeline for GPS travel surveys, including data cleaning, mobility pattern analysis, and visualization.
News
Projects
Spatial-Temporal Bayesian models for Uber pickup prediction
A comparison of four Bayesian models for Uber pickup prediction
Gender Discrepancies in Mobility Patterns
An Intersectional Perspective of Gender Differences in Travel Behaviors
SpatioTemporal Mobility Pattern Analytics
Examining Home and Work Anchors in Daily Life Using GPS Data
Data-driven GPS Travel Survey Data Quality Control
A data-driven post-processing framework to enhance the data quality of smartphone-based travel survey data
Traffic Data Pulling and Forecasting
Real-time traffic data pulling and modeling for trend comparision before and after Covid.
Transit Data Trend Visualization
A data analysis pipeline designed for transit data preprocessing, analysis, and visualization.
Generating Mobility Flow Using Deep Gravity Learning Model
Predicting Human Mobility with Deep Learning
ResNET CNN for Heart Disease Classification
A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) pipeline for the prediction of heart conduction disorders (CD) using ECGs data.
GPS Travel Survey Data Analytics
A data pipeline to process, analyze, and visualize GPS Travel Survey Data
Invasive Species Geo-simulation System
A real-time pipeline to monitor the spread of the stink bugs
Government trust and Covid Precaution
Exploring links between trust and COVID precautions in Africa
Women’s Reproductive Autonomy in Burkina Faso
Exploring links between women’s mobility and reproductive autonomy in Burkina Faso
Bayesian Prediction for Breast Cancer Diagnosis
A Bayesian data modeling pipeline for predicting breast cancer diagnosis based on cell nuclei features
Interactive Map of Racial Segregation
A block-level web map of black population in Twin Cities and the long-term effects of racial covenants
Publications
Contact
If you have job opportunities, collaborations, or insights to share, please don’t hesitate to connect.