Dr. Cheng’s research interests are in data science, machine learning, pattern recognition, signal/image processing, and biomedical/healthcare informatics. He is developing data mining and machine learning techniques to help advance biomedical research, for example, to integrate medical data from heterogeneous sources to find useful patterns, enable actionable insights, and facilitate data-driven knowledge discovery. He handles diverse kinds of data such as small-sample data, large-scale or big data, imaging data of various modalities, data with mixed types, and data with significant missing values. His work has appeared in various venues such as IEEE TPAMI, TNNLS, TSP, CVPR, ICDM, AAAI, ICDE, ACM TIST, KDD, TKDD, CIKM, NIPS, and AAAI. He also has a number of patents generated from his work.