Dr. Xingjie Wei

Profile

I am an Associate Professor in Business Analytics and Machine Learning in the Centre for Decision Research (CDR). My research group operates at the intersection of business analytics and human behaviour. We build predictive machine learning and decision-support models to solve complex operational problems across finance, marketing, and management. While conventional analytics relies heavily on structured, transactional data, our core focus is extracting actionable signals from the unstructured data (e.g., images, text and digital footprints) that drives real-world choices. Many of these signals are psychological rather than operational: personality, emotion, confidence, perceived competence and other human traits inferred from faces, language and online behaviour. This approach is particularly powerful in environments where traditional data is sparse, delayed, or uninformative. We work closely with colleagues across finance, marketing, operations and psychology, and with external partners including government departments, research councils, policing, and enterprises.

Current research interests:

• Predictive analytics for credit risk, fraud detection and financial decision-making
• Machine learning for unstructured and multimodal data in decision support
• Analytics for policy and social outcomes: wellbeing, inequality, and responsible business practice

Supervision

We welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students with backgrounds in operational research, analytics, computer science, statistics, psychology or a quantitative business discipline. Projects typically combine a substantive decision problem with methodological work in machine learning, and there is scope to weight the balance towards either. PhD Scholarship opportunities: University, White Rose. Visiting and Post-doc researchers are welcome to apply for competitive fellowships. For example, RS visiting fellowship , MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships.

Please contact me via email to discuss potential research opportunities. In your initial email, please include:

• A clear research proposal outlining your proposed study, research questions, and methodology
• A comprehensive CV highlighting your academic background, relevant experience, and technical skills

Grant

• 06/2026-09/2026, Primary supervisor, 'UK Corporate Accountability Under the Microscope: A Data-Driven Analysis of Modern Slavery Statements', £6,000 for two funded student research placements, The Laidlaw Foundation
• 12/2025-07/2026, PI, 'Embedding inclusive PI leadership in doctoral training', £14,882, Research England
• 10/2025-10/2027, Academic advisor, Knowledge transfer partnerships (KTP) with SR Mailing, on the project of 'LLM-enhanced decision support system for the sustainable packaging', £338,916, Innovate UK.
• 05/2024-05/2026, Academic advisor, Knowledge transfer partnerships (KTP) with Katchr, on the project of ‘AI-Powered financial intelligence dashboard for legal sector services’, £324,129, Innovate UK.
• 09/2023-09/2027, Primary supervisor, Collaborative Award, White Rose DTP, "Measuring life quality from digital footprints for informed policy decision making" to recruit a 4-year fully funded PhD student (international rates, equivalent to £150,166), ESRC
• 02/2022-06/2023, PI, "LINK: Climate change, social inequality & psychosocial wellbeing with emerging digital data - a multidisciplinary network between UK and South Korea", £45,758, ESRC
• 01/2022-08/2022, PI, "Predicting inequality from digital textual data", £21,467, LUBS Challenge Fund
• 07/2021-08/2021, PI, "Sentiment analysis from unstructured text and image data: a study to understand consumer emotion on laundry products", equivalent to £4,175 for two funded students research placements, The Nuffield Foundation
• 02/2019-11/2020, PI, "Visual analytics on CEO profile images in initial coin offerings (ICO)", £2,000, University of Leeds
• 02/2017-11/2017, PI, "Image pre-processing for automatic face recognition in forensics applications", £37,500, Metropolitan Police Service

Responsibilities

• Departmental Director of Postgraduate Research (2025-)
• Organiser for CDR Seminar Series (2021-2023)
• Head of Year for Bsc Business Analytics Programme (2018-2021)

Research interests

AI for Business, Business Analytics, Behavioural OR, Unstructured Data Mining, Human Factor

Qualifications

• Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)

Professional memberships

• IEEE
• British Academy of Management
• Operational Research Society

Student education

Teaching:

LUBS1086 Exploring Your Potential (2018-19), lecturer
LUBS2940 Business Analytics 2 (2018-21), module leader
LUBS3012 Data Analytics for Business (2025-current), module leader
LUBS3200 Business Analytics 3: Analytics Project (2018-19), module leader
LUBS5990M Machine Learning in Practice (2019-current), module leader

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Decision Research

Current postgraduate researchers

• Junhao Liang
• Siran Wang
• Yao Wang
• Yiru Chen