Mengchu Li

I'm currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics, University of Birmingham. Here is my University webpage.

From February 2023 to Septemeber 2024, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics, University of Warwick. In April 2023, I defended my PhD thesis which I worked on under the supervision of Professor Yi Yu at the University of Warwick.

Research Interests: change point analysis, high-dimensional statistics, robust statistics and differential privacy.

Email: m.li.15@bham.ac.uk

Publication and preprints

Federated Transfer Learning with Differential Privacy
M. Li, Y. Tian, Y. Feng, Y. Yu.
Preprint, 2026+.

Robust mean change point testing in high-dimensional data with heavy tails
M. Li*, Y. Chen*, T. Wang, Y. Yu.
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 72(1), 571-609, 2025.

On robustness and local differential privacy
M. Li, T.B. Berrett, Y. Yu.
Annals of Statistics 51(2), 717-737, 2023.

Contributions to robustness, local differential privacy and change point analysis
M. Li
PhD Thesis, 2023. (Harrison Award for highly commended thesis)

Network change point localisation under local differential privacy
M. Li, T.B. Berrett, Y. Yu.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS), 2022.

Adversarially robust change point detection
M. Li, Y. Yu.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS), 2021.

Multisite educational trials: estimating the effect size and its confidence intervals
A. Singh, G. Uwimpuhwe, M. Li, J. Einbeck, S. Higgins, A. Kasim
International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 45(1), 18-38, 2021.

PhD Openings

I have several projects for motivated PhD students. See for example here. Scholarships are available for sufficiently strong candidates. Please contact me if you are interested.

Teaching

At Birmingham, I lectured two master-level courses "Foundations of Statistical Inference" and "Bayesian Inference and Computation".

At Warwick, I led tutorials/labs for the following modules: Introduction to Mathematical Statistics, Linear Statistical Modelling with R, Statistical Laboratory.

Software

I contributed to the R package changepoints: A Collection of Change-Point Detection Methods.

Events

(Seminar talks) Sydney Business School, Warwick, York, Leeds, Southampton, Birmingham, Essex, Durham (upcoming in March, 2026)

(Conferences and workshops) Workshop on Modern Challenges in Data Decentralization 2026, International Conference on Frontiers of Data Science, DASS Workshop 2025, EcoStat 2025, JSM 2025, ICSDS 2024, Workshop on heterogeneous and distributed data 2024, CMStatistics 2023, Workshop on Statistical Analysis of Networks 2023, RSS Conference 2023, Workshop on Change Point Analysis 2023, NeurIPS 2022 (with Scholar award), ICORS 2022, IMS Annual Meeting 2022, ISNPS 2022, Structural Breaks and Shape Constraints workshop 2022, NeurIPS 2021, StatScale workshop 2021

Services

I have reviewed for Annals of Statistics, Bernoulli, Biometrika, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Machine Learning Research, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B, Statistica Sinica, Statistics and Computing, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, ACM/IMS Journal of Data Science, ISIT, NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML.

The source code for this website is adapted from here.