Yonggong (Tim) Lu

Law Building #602
USM Campus
Portland

Yonggang “Tim” Lu is Harold Alfond Associate Professor of Business Analytics in the Maine Business School at the University of Maine. Before joining UMaine in 2019, he was Assistant (2009 – 2014) and Associate (2014 – 2019) Professor of Quantitative Methods and Decision Sciences at the University of Alaska. Prior to his academic career, he worked at JPMorgan Chase Bank between 2007 and 2009 as a customer analytics specialist responsible for large-scale financial data mining and predictive modeling to support the bank’s marketing and risk management operations in the U.S. mortgage, home equity, and private student loan markets. He is also a financial risk manager (FRM) certified by the Global Association of Risk Professionals.

Education

Ph.D. Information Systems and Quantitative Sciences, Texas Tech University (2007)
M.S. Applied Mathematics, Texas Tech University (2007)
M.A. Economics, Texas Tech University (2006)
M.S. Finance, Texas Tech University (2004)
B.E. Chemical Process Equipment and Control Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University (2000)
B.A. Financial Economics, Xi’an Jiaotong University (2000)

Research Interests

His general area of research is data information modeling and knowledge learning with the focus on TREE (Transparent, Reliable, Efficient and Effective) Bayesian analytic models for information processing in support of business decision making. He has been working on developing general-purpose Bayesian inference algorithms that regularize machine and statistical learning models with subjective prior knowledge. His current research interests include Bayesian predictive inference based on weakly informative priors, Bayesian Networks modeling for behavioral analytics, social media information diffusion and opinion leadership.