​On 2019/03/15 Friday afternoon, Mr. Jafer Rahman presented the pre-defense of his PhD thesis entitled “Empirical Likelihood Based Inferences in Classification and Semiparametric Regression” at the School of Statistics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics.

The Defense Committee consisted of three professors of the school, named Dr. Sheng (GL), Dr. Hu and Dr. Yu. The seminar lasted about two hours. At the end, the professors asked a few questions and gave some suggestions to improve the thesis. Pro. Hu raised a question about the proposed classifiers if they can be used for any other datasets. To answer this question, the presenter said, “The nice performance of the proposed methods is shown on 6 different models in simulation study and 2 different real datasets, so such performance can be expected for any other datasets”. He also highlighted some corrections. Secondly, Pro. Yu proposed to revise the abstract part, include recent literature reviews and enhance the word length of the thesis. Finally, Pro. Sheng suggested to scale up various figures given in the thesis. Moreover, various modifications were suggested by all the professors to improve the thesis which are intended to entertain by the student.

The pre-defense can reflect the comprehensive level of postgraduate studies. Through the pre-defense, the school can examine the quality and the authenticity of the thesis, as well as the theoretical foundation and the capacities of strain and expression of the students. Meanwhile, the students can find their own shortcomings through pre-defense, and constantly improve themselves, so as to improve the preparation for their formal defense.