Introduction to ME!

Hello everyone in the 2025 Fall Data Wrangling Class!

I’m Weizhe Ren, a first-year Ph.D. student in Business Analytics at UC. My research interests are in developing Machine Learning and Deep Learning models for financial data, mainly focusing on predicting the future returns of stocks. In addition, with my background in Statistics, I’m also open to statistical topics.

I come from the central part of China. The most famous city in my province is Xi’an, which you may have heard of because of the Terracotta Warriors.

This is my first time coming to the U.S. and to Cincinnati, and I really love it here!

Academic Background

Professional Background

As mentioned above, I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Business Analytics, and this is my first semester.

In my daily work, besides attending classes, I am also working with my advisor to explore topics within my research interests. In addition, I am serving as a teaching assistant for two courses this semester, which is also part of my responsibilities.

Prior to this, I had never taken a break from my studies. However, I once interned as a data scientist at JD.com, a leading e-commerce company in China, where I was mainly responsible for data extraction and processing tasks.

Experience with R

I was first introduced to R in my freshman year, as my major was Statistics. Throughout my four years of undergraduate study, I was almost always working with R. I used it to complete many course projects, and I believe R has been incredibly helpful to me in areas such as

  • descriptive statistics;

  • data visualization;

  • regression analysis.

I look forward to exploring the world of R together with all of you in this course and using it to solve more data wrangling and analysis problems!