Faculty Profile for Dr. Yihong Yuan

profile photo for Dr. Yihong Yuan
Dr. Yihong Yuan
Associate Professor — Dept of Geography & Environmntl Studies
Program Faculty — Dept of Geography & Environmntl Studies
Program Faculty — Dept of Geography & Environmntl Studies
ELA 2203
phone: (512) 245-3208
Scholarly/Creative Work
Awards
Grants
Service

Biography Section

Biography and Education

 Ph.D. in Geography (Geographic Information Science), University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, 2013
(Specialization: Big data analytics, human mobility modeling, spatio-temporal data mining, and knowledge discovery)

M.A. in Statistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, 2013

B.S. in Geographic Information System, Peking University, China, 2009

Teaching Interests

 Geographic Information Science; Big Geodata and Urban Computing; Front-end and Back-end Programming

Research Interests

 Spatial-temporal Data Mining; Travel Behavior Modeling; Machine Learning; Geocomputation

Selected Scholarly/Creative Work

  • Yuan, Y., Wang, P., McKenzie, G., Sun, M., Xu, Y., & Priyanka. (2025). Human mobility in the post-pandemic world. In Urban Human Mobility-Practices, Analytics, and Strategies for Smart Cities (pp. 221–235). CRC Press.
  • Yuan, Y., & Wylie, A. G. (2024). Comparing machine learning and time series approaches in predictive modeling of urban fire incidents: a case study of Austin, Texas. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 13.
  • Wang, P., & Yuan, Y. (2024). Analyzing key factors influencing human mobility before and during COVID-19 with explainable machine learning. Transactions in GIS, 29(1), e13271.
  • Bobo, R. T., Chow, T. K. E., & Yuan, Y. (2024). Floor-level occupancy estimation of a multi-story building using coarse Wi-Fi data. Papers in Applied Geography, 1–27. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/23754931.2024.2407069
  • Jiang, Y., Yuan, Y., & Han, S. Y. (2024). An entropy-based measurement for understanding origin-destination trip distributions: a case study of New York City taxis. Big Earth Data, 8, 673--702. https://doi.org/10.1080/20964471.2024.2363548

Selected Awards

  • Award / Honor Recipient: Service Learning (SL) Fellow, SL Excellence Program, Texas State University. 2016 - Present
  • Award / Honor Recipient: International Cartographic Association (ICA) Travel Award, Cartography and Geographic Information Society. 2023
  • Award / Honor Recipient: International Cartographic Association (ICA) Travel Award, Cartography and Geographic Information Society. 2023
  • Award / Honor Recipient: Best Paper for Map Use/Information Graphics, Applied Geography Conference. 2022
  • Award / Honor Nominee: Top 20 Finalist, Global Young Scientist in GIScience, The 3rd Global Young Scientist Forum. 2022

Selected Grants

  • Yuan, Yihong (Principal). Service-learning Mini-Grant, Service Learning Excellence Program, Texas State University, $300. (Funded: 2016). Grant.
  • Yuan, Yihong (Principal). Characterizing Human Mobility from Mobile Phone Usage, Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship, UC Santa Barbara, Institutional (Higher Ed), $6667. (Funded: 2013). Grant.
  • Summers, Lucia (Principal), Yuan, Yihong (Co-Principal). Can hotspot policing reduce emergency response times while preventing crime? Using machine learning to improve the effectiveness of directed police patrol, Texas State Center for Analytics and Data Science, Texas State University, $1000. (Submitted: December 22, 2023, Funded: 2024 - 2025). Grant.
  • Luo, Xiaohua (Principal), Wang, Feng (Co-Principal), Yuan, Yihong (Co-Principal). National Summer Transportation Institute, Federal Highway Administration, Federal, $64760. (Submitted: September 2024, Funded: December 2024 - September 2025). Grant.
  • Yuan, Yihong (Principal). Advancing Spatial Analytical Methods through the Integration of Explainable Machine Learning, Texas State University, $3000. (Submitted: 2024, Funded: November 2024 - November 2025). Grant.

Selected Service Activities

Member
Member of Award Committee, Chinese Professional in Geographic Information Systems
2025-Present
Member
Executive Board of Texas State Center for Analytics and Data Science
2024-Present
Reviewer / Referee
International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology
2022-Present
Reviewer / Referee
International Journal of Digital Earth
2021-Present
Editorial Review Board Member
Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
2020-Present