Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics
University of California, Davis

I am an assistant professor at the Statistics department at U.C. Davis.

I am interested in using large-scale, granular sources of data, and statistical and machine learning methods, to measure and study human behavior. My current research is focused on global public health and estimating the social and economic consequences of violent conflict. You can find a magazine article about my recent work here. I was a 2024-25 Hellman Fellow.

Before this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley, working with Josh Blumenstock at the Global Policy Lab (formerly the Data-Intensive Development Lab). I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a PhD in Statistics. I was advised by Bill Eddy, and also worked closely with Nicolas Christin’s group at CyLab, CMU’s university-wide security institute.

I am originally from Singapore and was previously a government statistician at the Department of Statistics. I also spent some time at J.P. Morgan Chase as a quantitative modeler.

My first name is “Xiao Hui” (not Xiao!), and my last name is Tai.

News

08/2026 I will be giving a talk at the EcoSta conference.

06/2026 I will be leading a workshop at the BASS conference.

01/2026 Our work was featured in the Stats + Stories podcast.

10/2025 I gave talks at the UC Davis Psychology department, and at the RAND Statistics seminar.

09/2025 I will give a talk at the 21st Annual Workshop of the Households in Conflict Network.

06/2025 I will give a talk at the WNAR/IMS Annual Meeting in Whistler, Canada.

06/2025 I will give a talk at the 20th Australasian Development Economics Workshop in Sydney, Australia.

Publications

Xiao Hui Tai. Nearby Armed Conflict Affects Girls’ Education in Africa. PLOS ONE. 2025.

Pablo Busch, Paulo Rocha, Kyung Jin Lee, Luis Abdón Cifuentes and Xiao Hui Tai. Short-term exposure to fine particulate pollution and elderly mortality in Chile. Communications Earth & Environment. 2024. [Code]

Yury Elena Garcia Puerta, Miryam Elizabeth Villa-Perez, Kuang Li, Xiao Hui Tai, Luis A. Trejo, Maria L. Daza–Torres, J. Cricelio Montesinos-Lopez and Miriam Nuno. Wildfires and Social Media Discourse: Exploring Mental Health and Emotional Well-Being Through Twitter. Frontiers in Public Health. 2024.

Arogya Koirala, Suraj R. Nair and Xiao Hui Tai. Mapping Opium Poppy Cultivation: Socioeconomic Insights from Satellite Imagery. ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies. 2024. [Code] Early versions: 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS ’21) (poster track); 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’21), Workshop on Humanitarian Mapping

Xiao Hui Tai, Shikhar Mehra and Joshua E. Blumenstock. Mobile Phone Data Reveal the Effects of Violence on Internal Displacement. Nature Human Behavior. 2022. [Code] [Press].

Cornelia Ilin*, Sébastien Annan-Phan*, Xiao Hui Tai*, Shikhar Mehra, Solomon Hsiang and Joshua E. Blumenstock. Public Mobility Data Enables COVID-19 Forecasting and Management at Local and Global Scales. Nature Scientific Reports. 2021. (* indicates equal contribution) [Radio show]

Xiao Hui Tai and Kayla Frisoli. Benchmarking Minimax Linkage in Hierarchical Clustering. Data Analysis and Rationality in a Complex World. Springer International Publishing, 2021. [Code]

Xiao Hui Tai, Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin. Adversarial Matching of Dark Net Market Vendor Accounts. Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD). 2019. [Code] [Video]

Xiao Hui Tai. Record Linkage and Matching Problems in Forensics. IEEE 18th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW). IEEE, 2018.

Xiao Hui Tai and William F. Eddy. A Fully Automatic Method for Comparing Cartridge Case Images. Journal of Forensic Sciences. 2018. [Code]

Book Reviews, Chapters and Magazine Articles

Xiao Hui Tai. Data Science in Practice. The American Statistician. 2025.

Xiao Hui Tai. Counting the true cost of war. Significance (cover article). 2025. [Stats + Stories podcast]

Susan VanderPlas, Alicia Carriquiry, Heike Hofmann, James Hamby and Xiao Hui Tai. An Introduction to Firearms Examination for Researchers in Statistics. Handbook of Forensic Statistics. 2021.

Sam Tyner, Soyoung Park, Ganesh Krishnan, Karen Pan, Eric Hare, Amanda Luby, Xiao Hui Tai, Heike Hofmann, and Guillermo Basulto-Elias. 2019. OpenForSciR: Open Forensic Science in R. 2019.

Alicia Carriquiry, Heike Hofmann, Xiao Hui Tai and Susan VanderPlas. Machine Learning in Forensic Applications. Significance. 2019.

Pre-prints

Xiao Hui Tai. Regional PM\(_{2.5}\) changes around mine sites reflect shifts in economic activity and population. In submission.

Lauren Peritz, Carl Stahmer, Nick Ulle, Xiao Hui Tai and Katheryn Russ (alphabetical order). Uncovering Public Health Priorities at the World Health Organization. In submission.

Xiao Hui Tai and Olga Shemyakina. Adolescence, Armed Conflict, and Women’s Empowerment: Evidence from 34 African countries. In submission.

Xiao Hui Tai. Estimating the effect of violence on lifespan inequality using a spatio-temporal causal inference approach. In submission.

Xiao Hui Tai, Suraj R. Nair, Shikhar Mehra and Joshua E. Blumenstock. Satellite and Mobile Phone Data Reveal How Violence Affects Seasonal Migration in Afghanistan. In revision at Nature Communications.

Xiao Hui Tai and William F. Eddy. Automatically Matching Topographical Measurements of Cartridge Cases Using a Record Linkage Framework. arXiv:2003.00060.

Teaching

In Fall 2022, 2023 and 2024, I taught STA 35A, a new introductory statistical data science course for data science majors at UC Davis.

In Fall 2023, 2024 and Winter 2026, I also taught STA 160 Practice in Statistical Data Science, an undergraduate capstone course.

I taught STA 141C Big Data and High Performance Statistical Computing in Spring 2024.

In Winter 2023, I taught STA 250, a research seminar on Data Science for International Development.

In Winter 2026, I taught STA 260 Statistical Practice and Data Analysis, a grad level course on consulting and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Last updated: 2026-05-07.