Related papers: Leo Breiman
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…
The study of associations and their causal explanations is a central research activity whose methodology varies tremendously across fields. Even within specialized subfields, comparisons across textbooks and journals reveals that the basics…
Every scientific endeavour consists of (at least) two components: A hypothesis on the one hand and data on the other. There is always a more or less abstract level - some theory, a set of concepts, certain relations of ideas - and a…
What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners, blindly…
Statistics is one of the most valuable of disciplines. Science is based on proof and it alone produces results, other approaches are not, and do not. Statistics is the only acceptable language of proof in science. Yet statistics is…
Breiman challenged statisticians to think more broadly, to step into the unknown, model-free learning world, with him paving the way forward. Statistics community responded with slight optimism, some skepticism, and plenty of disbelief.…
Leo Breiman was a highly creative, influential researcher with a down-to-earth personal style and an insistence on working on important real world problems and producing useful solutions. This paper is a short review of Breiman's extensive…
The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed…
The research on and application of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered a comprehensive scientific, economic, social and political discussion. Here we argue that statistics, as an interdisciplinary scientific field, plays a…
What do we teach and what should we teach? An honest answer to this question is painful, very painful--what we teach lags decades behind what we practice. How can we reduce this `gap' to prepare a data science workforce of trained…
Causality and causal inference have emerged as core research areas at the interface of modern statistics and domains including biomedical sciences, social sciences, computer science, and beyond. The field's inherently interdisciplinary…
People who by training end up dealing with probabilities ("statisticians") roughly fall into one of two camps. One is either a frequentist or a Bayesian. To a scientist, who needs to use probabilities to make sense of the real world, this…
As the amount of linked data published on the web grows, attempts are being made to describe and measure it. However even basic statistics about a graph, such as its size, are difficult to express in a uniform and predictable way. In order…
In a landmark paper published in 2001, Leo Breiman described the tense standoff between two cultures of data modeling: parametric statistical and algorithmic machine learning. The cultural division between these two statistical learning…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
The philosophical foundations of statistics involve issues in theoretical statistics, such as goals and methods to meet these goals, and interpretation of the meaning of inference using statistics. They are related to the philosophy of…
Statistics has moved beyond the frequentist-Bayesian controversies of the past. Where does this leave our ability to interpret results? I suggest that a philosophy compatible with statistical practice, labeled here statistical pragmatism,…
We claim that human mathematics is only a limited part of the consequences of the chosen basic axioms. Properly human mathematics varies with time but appears to have universal features which we try to analyze. In particular the functioning…
A critically challenging problem facing statisticians is the identification of a suitable framework which consolidates data of various types, from different sources, and across different time frames or scales (many of which can be missing),…
Perhaps more than other physical sciences, astronomy is frequently statistical in nature. The objects under study are inaccessible to direct manipulation in the laboratory, so the astronomer is restricted to observing a few external…