An excerpt from “A Conversation with Leo Breiman”

hlee — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:21:41 +0000

Leo Breiman (1928-2005) was one of the most dominant statisticians from the 20th century. He was well known for his textbook in probability theory as well as his contributions to the machine learning, such as CART (Classification and Regression Tree), bagging (bootstrap aggregation), and Random Forest. He was the founding father of statistical machine learning. His works can be found from http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~breiman/

An excerpt from “A Conversation with Leo Breiman,” from Statistical Science, by Richard Olshen (2001), 16(2), pp. 184–198, casts a second thought on the direction of statistical researches:

Alice in Wonderland. That is, I knew what was going on out in industry and government in terms of uses of statistics, but what was going on in academic research seemed light years away. It was proceeding as though it were some branch of abstract mathematics. One of our senior faculty members said a while back, “We have to keep alive the spirit of Wald.” But before the good old days of Wald and the divorce of statistics from data, there were the good old days of Fisher, who believed that statistics existed for the purposes of prediction and explanation and working with data.

He foresaw where statistics were heading. His more interesting critics can be found from Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures, by Leo Breiman (2001), Statistical Science, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Aug., 2001), pp. 199-215.

The reason for presenting this excerpt is to emphasize that the efforts from CHASC is following the wishes of Leo Breiman’s: statistical researches for (astronomical) data.

[Oct. 14, 2008] The link to Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures, by Leo Breiman (2001), Statistical Science, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Aug., 2001), pp. 199-215. is updated to a pdf file.

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An excerpt from “A Conversation with Leo Breiman”