Related papers: Leo Breiman
Data science is the business of learning from data, which is traditionally the business of statistics. Data science, however, is often understood as a broader, task-driven and computationally-oriented version of statistics. Both the term…
What is the largest number accessible to the human imagination? The question is neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. Mathematical formulations of the problem fall into two classes: those that fail to fully capture the…
The integration of the history and philosophy of statistics was initiated at least by Hacking (1975) and advanced by Hacking (1990), Mayo (1996), and Zabell (2005), but it has not received sustained follow-up. Yet such integration is more…
The purpose of this essay is to bring out the unique role of Mathematics in providing a base to the diverse sciences which conform to its rigid structure. Of these the physical and economic sciences are so intimately linked with…
Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the 'invisible' portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist…
Physicists study a wide variety of phenomena creating new interdisciplinary research fields by applying theories and methods originally developed in physics in order to solve problems in economics, social science, biology, medicine,…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
Even today, the concept of entropy is perceived by many as quite obscure. The main difficulty is analyzed as being fundamentally due to the subjectivity and anthropocentrism of the concept that prevent us to have a sufficient distance to…
The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical evaluation of…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is unlocking transformative capabilities for mathematics. There is great hope that AI will help solve major open problems and autonomously discover new mathematical concepts. In this essay, we…
The role of mathematics in a complex system such as the Internet has yet to be deeply explored. In this paper, we summarize some of the important and pressing problems in cyber security from the viewpoint of open science environments. We…
Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…
The paper discusses fundamental problems in mathematical description of social systems based on physical concepts, with so-called statistical social systems being the main subject of consideration. Basic properties of human beings and human…
Mathematics is a limited component of solutions to real-world problems, as it expresses only what is expected to be true if all our assumptions are correct, including implicit assumptions that are omnipresent and often incorrect.…
Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…
This special volume of Statistical Sciences presents some innovative, if not provocative, ideas in the area of reliability, or perhaps more appropriately named, integrated system assessment. In this age of exponential growth in science,…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides many opportunities to improve private and public life. Discovering patterns and structures in large troves of data in an automated manner is a core component of data science, and currently drives…
Mathematics cannot anymore be assimilated to a linguistic game, where formal proofs are strongly differentiated with conjectural thinking, without building any category of knowledge to understand the passage (Wittgenstein's gist). Nowadays,…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
Although not as wide, and popular, as that of quantum mechanics, the investigation of fundamental aspects of statistical mechanics constitutes an important research field in the building of modern physics. Besides the interest for itself,…