Xinyan Cheng

• policing and crime statistics
• social media analysis
• big data techniques
• social insurance and welfare

Role

Xinyan Cheng joined the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) as a PhD candidate in March 2017. Her research, under the supervision of Professor Nick Pearce, Dr Theresa Smith and Professor Julie Barnett, will focus on big data with applications to policing. She will apply data science techniques to the analysis of police operational data, crime statistics and social media usage, with the aim of assessing police effectiveness, legitimacy and public trust.

Career

Before joining the IPR team, Xinyan also worked for RESSET, a Beijing-based technology company specialising in financial software and data. In this role, she was responsible for dealing with data related to cross-national social science issues like the economy, public health and employment in the construction of an international research database.

Education

In 2015, Xinyan received a BEcon in Actuarial Science and Risk Management from the University of International Business and Economics, China. Her bachelor’s thesis discussed applying stochastic control in reinsurance strategies. Then, in 2016, she completed an MSc in Statistics and Computational Finance at the University of York, UK. Her master’s research was on the relationship between wellbeing and personal indicators like job status, marital status, income and gender, estimated by semiparametric mixed models.