Yi-Fan Chen, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine. Before joining Pitt, she has been a biostatistician with extensive experience in collaborative research and hands-on data analysis within the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2013. She was involved in many studies related to behavioral risk factors among older Asian Americans, retinal dysfunction, hemodynamics, hepatocellular carcinoma, and dry eye disease. In addition to major statistical approaches, such as longitudinal data analysis, she is interested in machine learning, particularly tree-based modeling for subgroup identification, the design and analysis of clinical trials, and meta-analysis.
Education & Training
- BS (Applied Mathematics), National Chiao Tung University, 2004
- MS (Biostatistics), National Yang-Ming University, 2006
- PhD (Biostatistics), University of Pittsburgh, 2013
Representative Publications
Chen YF, Yabes JG, Brooks MM, Singh S, Weissfeld LA. A likelihood ratio test for nested proportions. Statistics in Medicine, 2015, 34(3):525-538.
A likelihood ratio test was proposed to compare two nested proportions by using the product of conditional probabilities. This test accommodates the conditionality, subject dependencies, and cluster effects and can be implemented in SAS PROC NLMIXED.
Stapleton CJ, Cheny YF, Shallwani H, Vakharia K, Turan TN, Woo HH, ... Amin-Hanjani S. Submaximal angioplasty for symptomatic intracranial atherosclerotic disease: A meta-analysis of peri-procedural and long-term risk. Neurosurgery, 2020, 86(6):755-762.
A meta-analysis using mixed effects logistic regression with DerSimonian and Laird estimator and Knapp and Hartung standard error adjustment was conducted to examine the peri-procedural and long-term risks associated with submaximal angioplasty for ICAD. The results showed that submaximal angioplasty represents a potentially promising intervention.
Li CC, Chen YF, Liang J, Matthews AK, Barnes LL. Trajectories of multiple behavioral risk factors and their associations with cognitive function trajectories among older African Americans and White Americans. Journal of Aging and Health, 2021, 33(9):674-684.
A secondary data analysis evaluated the effect of ethnicity and behavioral risk factor patterns over time on cognitive function using multi-trajectory modeling. The study found no interaction effect between ethnicity and joint behavioral trajectories, but the “drinking and overweight” group was associated with the “moderate” or “high” cognitive functioning group.
Kaelin V, Villegas V, Chen YF, Murphy N, Papautsky E, Litfin J, ... Khetani M. Effectiveness and scalability of an electronic patient-reported outcome measure and decision support tool for family-centred and participation-focused early intervention: PROSPECT hybrid type 1 trial protocol. BMJ Open, 2022, 12(1):e051582.
A clustered randomized trial at the Early intervention (EI) service coordinator level aimed to assess the effectiveness of implementing the YC-PEM e-PRO measure and decision support tool for routine EI care on service quality and child outcomes. Between-within approach was proposed to adjust for the small number of clusters in conjunction with generalized linear mixed models.
Click here for a more complete bibliography of Dr. Chen's works.
Research Interests
- Tree-based modeling for subgroup identification
- Design and analysis of clinical trials
- Meta-analysis
- Longitudinal data analysis