## the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years

Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 10, 2020 by xi'an

Aki and Andrew are celebrating the New Year in advance by composing a list of the most important statistics ideas occurring (roughly) since they were born (or since Fisher died)! Like

• substitution of computing for mathematical analysis (incl. bootstrap)
• fitting a model with a large number of parameters, using some regularization procedure to get stable estimates and good predictions (e.g., Gaussian processes, neural networks, generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders)
• multilevel or hierarchical modelling (incl. Bayesian inference)
• advances in statistical algorithms for efficient computing (with a long list of innovations since 1970, including ABC!), pointing out that a large fraction was of the  divide & conquer flavour (in connection with large—if not necessarily Big—data)
• statistical decision analysis (e.g., Bayesian optimization and reinforcement learning, getting beyond classical experimental design )
• robustness (under partial specification, misspecification or in the M-open world)
• EDA à la Tukey and statistical graphics (and R!)
• causal inference (via counterfactuals)

Now, had I been painfully arm-bent into coming up with such a list, it would have certainly been shorter, for lack of opinion about some of these directions (even the Biometrika deputeditoship has certainly helped in reassessing the popularity of different branches!), and I would have have presumably been biased towards Bayes as well as more mathematical flavours. Hence objecting to the witty comment that “theoretical statistics is the theory of applied statistics”(p.10) and including Ghosal and van der Vaart (2017) as a major reference. Also bemoaning the lack of long-term structure and theoretical support of a branch of the machine-learning literature.

Maybe also more space and analysis could have been spent on “debates remain regarding appropriate use and interpretation of statistical methods” (p.11) in that a major difficulty with the latest in data science is not so much the method(s) as the data on which they are based, which in a large fraction of the cases, is not representative and is poorly if at all corrected for this bias. The “replication crisis” is thus only one (tiny) aspect of the challenge.

## estimation exam [best of]

Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , on January 29, 2019 by xi'an

Yesterday, I received a few copies of our CRC Press Handbook of Mixture Analysis, while grading my mathematical statistics exam 160 copies. Among the few goodies, I noticed the always popular magical equality

E[1/T]=1/E[T]

that must have been used in so many homeworks and exam handouts by now that it should become a folk theorem. More innovative is the argument that E[1/min{X¹,X²,…}] does not exist for iid U(0,θ) because it is the minimum and thus is the only one among the order statistics with the ability to touch zero. Another universal shortcut was the completeness conclusion that when the integral

$\int_0^\theta \varphi(x) x^k \text{d}x$

was zero for all θ’s then φ had to be equal to zero with no further argument (only one student thought to take the derivative). Plus a growing inability in the cohort to differentiate even simple functions… (At least, most students got the bootstrap right, as exemplified by their R code.) And three stars to the student who thought of completely gluing his anonymisation tag, on every one of his five sheets!, making identification indeed impossible, except by elimination of the 159 other names.

## bootstrap in Nature

Posted in Statistics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2018 by xi'an

A news item in the latest issue of Nature I received about Brad Efron winning the “Nobel Prize of Statistics” this year. The bootstrap is certainly an invention worth the recognition, not to mention Efron’s contribution to empirical Bayes analysis,, even though I remain overall reserved about the very notion of a Nobel prize in any field… With an appropriate XXL quote, who called the bootstrap method the ‘best statistical pain reliever ever produced’!

## exams

Posted in Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , on February 7, 2018 by xi'an
As in every term, here comes the painful week of grading hundreds of exams! My mathematical statistics exam was highly traditional and did not even involve Bayesian material, as the few students who attended the lectures were so eager to discuss sufficiency and ancilarity, that I decided to spend an extra lecture on these notions rather than rushing though conjugate priors. Highly traditional indeed with an inverse Gaussian model and a few basic consequences of Basu’s theorem. actually exposed during this lecture. Plus mostly standard multiple choices about maximum likelihood estimation and R programming… Among the major trends this year, I spotted out the widespread use of strange derivatives of negative powers, the simultaneous derivation of two incompatible convergent estimates, the common mixup between the inverse of a sum and the sum of the inverses, the inability to produce the MLE of a constant transform of the parameter, the choice of estimators depending on the parameter, and a lack of concern for Fisher informations equal to zero.

## what is your favorite teacher?

Posted in Kids, Statistics, University life with tags , , , , , , , , on October 14, 2017 by xi'an

When Jean-Louis Foulley pointed out to me this page in the September issue of Amstat News, about nominating a favourite teacher, I told him it had to be an homonym statistician! Or a practical joke! After enquiry, it dawned on me that this completely underserved inclusion came from a former student in my undergraduate Estimation course, who was very enthusiastic about statistics and my insistence on modelling rather than mathematical validation. He may have been the only one in the class, as my students always complain about not seeing the point in slides with no mathematical result. Like earlier this week when after 90mn on introducing the bootstrap method, a student asked me what was new compared with the Glivenko-Cantelli theorem I had presented the week before… (Thanks anyway to David for his vote and his kind words!)