Professor Tsai is a recognized expert in the practical application of statistics in business, including regression analysis, model selection, high dimensional data, time series, biostatistics, application of statistics in business. He has had more than 80 research papers published in the academic journals relating to statistics, marketing, finance and biostatistics. He teaches courses on forecasting and managerial research methods, and time series analysis and forecasting.

Tsai has developed new statistical models based upon regression and time series analysis, and co-authored a book on the subject. He has collaborated with other Graduate School of Management faculty to produce a new method to analyze the effectiveness of advertising, which helps companies and media buyers determine an unbiased optimal advertising budget. He has also worked on projects to develop statistical methods that can be applied when analyzing long-term investment strategies. He has applied one of the newest techniques in statistics, called Sliced Inverse Regression, which helps predict sales response to individual customers based on where they live, their age, size of family, income, zip code, and other factors.