Wendy K Tam Cho

About

Wendy K Tam Cho is a professor in the Departments of Political Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Asian American Studies, and the College of Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a faculty member in the Illinois Informatics Institute, and an affiliate of several research centers including the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, the Computational Science and Engineering Program, and the Program on Law, Behavior, and Social Science. Her professional affiliations include being a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Society for Political Methodology, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences at Stanford University, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Machine Learning
• Sociology
• Econometrics
• Demography
• Data science
• Medicine
• Gerontology
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Sampling from complicated and unknown distributions

  Physica A Statistical Mechanics and its Applications · 2018-04-16 · 46 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Testing Causal Theories with Learned Proxies

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2022 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Social scientists commonly use computational models to estimate proxies of unobserved concepts, then incorporate these proxies into subsequent tests of their theories. The consequences of this practice, which occurs in over two-thirds of recent computational work in political science, are underappreciated. Imperfect proxies can reflect noise and contamination from other concepts, producing biased point estimates and standard errors. We demonstrate how analysts can use causal diagrams to articula…

  PublisherDOI

• A Reasonable Bias Approach to Gerrymandering: Using Automated Plan Generation to Evaluate Redistricting Proposals

  2018-04-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  Publisher

• An evolutionary algorithm for subset selection in causal inference models

  Journal of the Operational Research Society · 2017-06-29 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Researchers in all disciplines desire to identify causal relationships. Randomized experimental designs isolate the treatment effect and thus permit causal inferences. However, experiments are often prohibitive because resources may be unavailable or the research question may not lend itself to an experimental design. In these cases, a researcher is relegated to analyzing observational data. To make causal inferences from observational data, one must adjust the data so that they resemble data th…

  PublisherDOI

• Differential Effects of Race/Ethnicity and Social Vulnerability on COVID-19 Positivity, Hospitalization, and Death in the San Francisco Bay Area

  Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities · 2022 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Yan Liu

  22 shared

• George G. Judge

  University of California, Berkeley

  14 shared

• James G. Gimpel

  12 shared

• Bruce E. Cain

  Stanford University

  11 shared

• Brian J. Gaines

  10 shared

• David G. Hwang

  9 shared

• Joanne Lee

  NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre

  7 shared

• Shaowen Wang

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D

  U.C. Berkeley

  1997

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
• Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology
• Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Scie…
• Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford Univer…

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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• Cara J Wongh-17
• Waïl S Hassanh-12