Research

Research Interests

  • Methodology: Optimization, Queueing, Empirical
  • Applications: Health care and other public sectors, including allocation and matching of scarce resources (organs, public housing units),  emergency room, border-crossing, appointment scheduling, and surgeries, post COVID operations

 

Research Papers:

(Authors indicated with * are students that I supervised, those with ^ are clinical collaborators.)

Working Papers

“Comparison of Data Mining Algorithms for Emergency Room Wait Time Predictions”, with Jie Wang*, Mahesh Nagarajan, Leung Arnold^, Garth Hunte^, Wiston MacKenzie^, Julian Marsden^.

“Portability Maximization for Public Housing: A Centralized Approach”, with Daniel Granot, Weihua Zhang*.

“A Combined Use of …”, Yichuan Ding, Preveena Dharmaraj^, Sean Hardy^, Sarah McAnally^, Zhen Liu*, Garth Hunte^, Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine, revision for re-submission.

Journal Articles (referred or submitted)

(For papers under review of medical journals, titles are hided.)

“Early Reservation for Follow-up Appointments: Enhancing Patient Care Continuity”, Yichuan Ding, Diwakar Gupta, and Shenghai Zhou (2023), submitted.

“Tight Bounds for The Price of Fairness”, Yifeng Cao*, Yichuan Ding, Daniel Granot (2023), submitted.

“Adaptive Server Behavior to Deviations in Schedules and Consequences: Evidence from Operating Rooms“, Yiwen Jin*, Yichuan Ding, Steven Shechter, Juapal Arneja^, major revision, MSOM.

“The Cost of Task Switching: Evidence from the Emergency Department“, Yiwen Jin*, Yige Duan*, Yichuan Ding, Mahesh Nagarajan, Garth Hunte^, rejected and resubmitted, MSOM.

“Parallel Queues with Choice-Driven Arrivals: Asymptotic Analysis and Optimal Staffing”, Yichuan Ding, Mahesh Nagarajan, George Zhang (2019), Operations Research, major revision.

“Early Reservation for Follow-up Appointments in a Slotted-Service Queue”, Yichuan Ding, Diwakar Gupta, Xiaoxu Tang, Operations Research, accepted.

  • a preliminary version presented at the 2015 MSOM Healthcare SIG Conference.

“Do Microsurgical Outcomes Differ Based on Which Specialty Does the Operation? An Analysis of 6,617 Cases from the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program”, Jacques X. Zhang^, Melissa Wan^, Yichuan Ding, Yiwen Jin*, Mahesh Nagarajan, Marija Bucevska^, Douglas Courtemanche^, Julie Bedford^, Jugpal S. Arneja^ (2019), Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Global Open, accepted.

“Association of Intensive Care Unit Occupancy During Admission and Inpatient Mortality: An Historical Cohort Study”, Nicholas Fergusson^, Steve Ahkioon^, Mahesh Nagarajan, Eric Park, Yichuan Ding, Najib Ayas^, Vinay Dhingra^, Dean Chittock^, Donald Griesdale^ (2019), Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, accepted.

“Constant Job-Allowance Policies for Appointment Scheduling: Performance Bounds and Numerical Analysis”, Shenghai Zhou*, Yichuan Ding, Tim Huh, Guohua Wan (2018), Production and Operations Management, accepted. SSRN link

  • Finalist, best student paper prize, 2019 POMS International Conference, Tianjin, China.

“High Risk Plastic Surgery: An Analysis of 108,303 Cases from the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program”, Melissa Wan*, Jacques X. Zhang^, Yichuan Ding, Yiwen Jin*, Julie Bedford^, Mahesh Nagarajan, Marija Bucevska^, Douglas Courtemanche^, Jugpal S. Arneja^, Canadian Plastic Surgery Journal, accepted.

“A Fluid Model for an Overloaded Bipartite Queueing System with Scoring-Based Priority Rules”, Yichuan Ding, Thomas McCormick, Mahesh Nagarajan (2018), Operations Research, accepted.

“Do financial incentives change length-of-stay performance in emergency departments? A retrospective study of the Pay-for-Performance program in Metro Vancouver”, Yuren Wang*, Yichuan Ding, Eric Park*, Garth Hunte^, Academic Emergency Medicine, accepted.

“An Achievable-Region-Based Approach for Kidney Allocation Policy Design with Endogenous Patient Choice”, Baris Ata, Yichuan Ding, Stefanos Zenios (2018), Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, accepted. Link to the Full Appendices

  • Finalist, 2019 Pierskalla Best Paper Competition
  • Presented at the 2019 MSOM Healthcare SIG Conference

“A Non-Asymptotic Approach to Analyzing Kidney Exchange Graphs”, Yichuan Ding, Dongdong Ge, Simai He, Chris Ryan (2018). Operations Research, 66:4, 918-935.

“Patient Prioritization in Emergency Department Triage Systems: An Empirical Study of Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS)” (Link to the Full Appendices) , Yichuan Ding, Eric Park*, Mahesh Nagarajan, Eric Grafstein^ (2019). Manufacturing and Service Operations Management,  accepted.

  • 3rd Place, INFORMS Behavioral Operations Best Working Paper Award, 2017
  • Presented at the 2015 MSOM Healthcare SIG Conference

“A Data-Driven Approach to Manpower Planning at US–Canada Border Crossings.”  Yu Mengqiao*, Yichuan Ding, Robin Lindsey, Cong Shi (2016). Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 91, 34-47.

“A K‐Nearest-Neighbors Survival Probability Prediction Method.”  David Lowsky, Yichuan Ding,  Donald Lee, Charles McCulloch^, Lainie Ross^, Richard Thistlethwaite^, Stefanos Zenios (2013). Statistics in Medicine, 32(12), 2062-2069.

“Price of correlations in Stochastic Optimization.” Shipra Agrawal, Yichuan Ding, Amin Saberi, Yinyu Ye (2012). Operations Research, 60(1), 150-162.

  • Honorable Mention, the First Student Paper Competition, Committee on Stochastic Programming (COSP).
  • A preliminary version “Correlation Robust Stochastic Optimization” has appeared in Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)

“On equivalence of semidefinite relaxations for quadratic matrix programming.” Yichuan Ding, Dongdong Ge, Henry Wolkowicz (2011).  Mathematics of Operations Research, 36(1), 88-104.

“Sensor network localization, Euclidean distance matrix completions, and graph realization.” Yichuan Ding, Nathan Krislock, Jiawang Qian, Henry Wolkowicz (2010). Optimization and Engineering, 11(1), 45-66.

“A Low-Dimensional Semidefinite Relaxation for the Quadratic Assignment Problem.” Yichuan Ding, Henry Wolkowicz (2009). Mathematics of Operations Research, 34(4), 1008-1022.

Conference Proceedings

“A non-asymptotic approach to analyzing kidney exchange graphs.” Yichuan Ding, Dongdong Ge, Simai He, Chris Ryan. In Proceedings of EC’15 (The 16th ACM conference on Economics and Computation).

“Correlation robust stochastic optimization.” Shipra Agrawal, Yichuan Ding, Amin Saberi, Yinyu Ye.  In Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) (pp. 1087-1096).

“Real-time tracking for sensor networks via SDP and gradient method.” Zizhuo Wang and Yichuan Ding.  In Proceedings of the first ACM international workshop on Mobile entity localization and tracking in GPS-less environments (pp. 109-112). ACM.

“A note on the trackability of dynamic sensor networks.” Yichuan Ding. In Proceedings of the first ACM international workshop on Mobile entity localization and tracking in GPS-less environments (pp. 113-116). ACM.