Related papers: Comments on "Two Cultures": What have changed over…
This is the English version of my inaugural lecture at Coll\`ege de France in 2021, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxktplKMhKU. I reflect on the difficulty of multi-disciplinary research, which often hinges of unexpected…
I published an interview of Leo Breiman in Statistical Science [Olshen (2001)], and also the solution to a problem concerning almost sure convergence of binary tree-structured estimators in regression [Olshen (2007)]. The former summarized…
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has significantly changed many domains, including applied statistics. This review and vision paper explores the evolving role of applied statistics in the AI era, drawing from our…
In the age of big data and advanced computational methods, the prediction of large-scale social behaviors, reminiscent of Isaac Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, is becoming increasingly feasible. This paper consists of a…
Random forests are a scheme proposed by Leo Breiman in the 2000's for building a predictor ensemble with a set of decision trees that grow in randomly selected subspaces of data. Despite growing interest and practical use, there has been…
Deep learning (DL) has gained much attention and become increasingly popular in modern data science. Computer scientists led the way in developing deep learning techniques, so the ideas and perspectives can seem alien to statisticians.…
Using frequency distributions of daily closing price time series of several financial market indexes, we investigate whether the bias away from an equiprobable sequence distribution found in the data, predicted by algorithmic information…
Statistics experiences a storm around the perceived misuse and possible abuse of its methods in the context of the so-called reproducibility crisis. The methods and styles of quantification practiced in mathematical modelling rarely make it…
Why do biased predictions arise? What interventions can prevent them? We evaluate 8.2 million algorithmic predictions of math performance from $\approx$400 AI engineers, each of whom developed an algorithm under a randomly assigned…
About 45,000 years ago, symbolic and technological complexity of human artefacts increased drastically. Computer simulations of Powell, Shennan and Thomas (2009) explained it through an increase of the population density, facilitating the…
In the past two decades, psychological science has experienced an unprecedented replicability crisis which uncovered several issues. Among others, statistical inference is too often viewed as an isolated procedure limited to the analysis of…
We review the historical development and current trends of artificially intelligent agents (agentic AI) in the social and behavioral sciences: from the first programmable computers, and social simulations soon thereafter, to today's…
Half a century ago, Charles Bachman foresaw the significance and centrality of data in the digital world. In this short paper, we delve into the evolution of these ideas within the database community over the past decades. We believe that…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Without the ability to estimate and benchmark AI capability advancements, organizations are left to respond to each change reactively, impeding their ability to build viable mid and long-term strategies. This paper explores the recent…
Random forests are ensemble learning methods introduced by Breiman (2001) that operate by averaging several decision trees built on a randomly selected subspace of the data set. Despite their widespread use in practice, the respective roles…
Since their emergence in the 1990's, the support vector machine and the AdaBoost algorithm have spawned a wave of research in statistical machine learning. Much of this new research falls into one of two broad categories: kernel methods and…
Two algorithms proposed by Leo Breiman : CART trees (Classification And Regression Trees for) introduced in the first half of the 80s and random forests emerged, meanwhile, in the early 2000s, are the subject of this article. The goal is to…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
The replication crisis has prompted many to call for statistical reform within the psychological sciences. Here we examine issues within Frequentist statistics that may have led to the replication crisis, and we examine the…