Related papers: Remembering Leo Breiman
This paper is a short exposition of Stein's method of normal approximation from my personal perspective. It focuses mainly on the characterization of the normal distribution and the construction of Stein identities. Through examples, it…
The random forest algorithm, proposed by L. Breiman in 2001, has been extremely successful as a general-purpose classification and regression method. The approach, which combines several randomized decision trees and aggregates their…
I arrived in Berkeley in 1957, at which time Leo was an Acting Assistant Professor of Mathematics here. He had recently proven the "individual ergodic theorem of information theory"---a triumph---and since this was becoming central to my…
In the famous Two Cultures paper, Leo Breiman provided a visionary perspective on the cultures of ''data models'' (modeling with consideration of data generation) versus ''algorithmic models'' (vanilla machine learning models). I provide a…
Wasssily Hoeffding's terminal illness and untimely death in 1991 put an end to efforts that were made to interview him for Statistical Science. An account of his scientific work is given in Fisher and Sen [The Collected Works of Wassily…
Given an ensemble of randomized regression trees, it is possible to restructure them as a collection of multilayered neural networks with particular connection weights. Following this principle, we reformulate the random forest method of…
William Kruskal (Bill) was a distinguished statistician who spent virtually his entire professional career at the University of Chicago, and who had a lasting impact on the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and on the field of statistics…
The following conversation is based in part on a transcript of a 2009 interview funded by Pfizer Global Research-Connecticut, the American Statistical Association and the Department of Statistics at the University of Connecticut-Storrs as…
This contribution to the book in honour of J.S. Bell will probably differ from the remaining ones, in particular since only a part of it will be devoted to specific technical arguments. In fact I have considered appropriate to share with…
Probit regression was first proposed by Bliss in 1934 to study mortality rates of insects. Since then, an extensive body of work has analyzed and used probit or related binary regression methods (such as logistic regression) in numerous…
The intersection set of Bayesian and nonparametric statistics was almost empty until about 1973, but now is growing at a healthy rate. This chapter, for the {\it Highly Structured Stochastic Systems} book (Oxford University Press, 2003)…
The mathematical achievements of Harry Kesten since the mid-1950s have revolutionized probability theory as a subject in its own right and in its associations with aspects of algebra, analysis, geometry, and statistical physics. Through his…
I try to describe the extremely fruitful interaction I had with Harry Lehmann and the results which came out of the analyticity unitarity programme, especially the proof of the Froissart bound, which, with recent and future measurements of…
I present some reminiscences, both personal and scientific, over a lifetime of admiration of, and friendship with, one of the Grandmasters of our subject.
A comparison is made of the traditional Loschmidt (reversibility) and Zermelo (recurrence) objections to Boltzmann's H-theorem, and its simplified variant in the Ehrenfests' 1912 wind-tree model. The little-cited 1896 (pre-recurrence)…
Lecture given at the International Meeting ``Boltzmann's Legacy - 150 Years after his Birth'', organized by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 25 - 28 May 1994, in Rome, to be published in: ``Atti dell"Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei'',…
The article is dedicated to recalling the life and mathematics of Louis Nirenberg, a distinguished Canadian mathematician who recently died in New York, where he lived. An emblematic figure of Analysis and Partial Differential Equations in…
I first met Louis Nirenberg in person in 1972 when I became a Courant Instructor. He was already a celebrated mathematician and a suave sophisticated New Yorker, even though he was born in Hamilton, Canada and grew up in Montreal. In this…
Professor Alan Selman has been a giant in the field of computational complexity for the past forty years. This article is an appreciation, on the occasion of his retirement, of some of the most lovely concepts and results that Alan has…
This work pioneers the systematic study and classification (up to Lie algebra automorphisms) of finite-dimensional coboundary Lie bialgebras through Grassmann algebras. Several mathematical structures on Lie algebras, e.g. Killing forms or…