Bradley Efron (; born May 24, 1938) is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the
American Statistical Association
The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...
(2004) and of the
Institute of Mathematical Statistics
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...
(1987–1988).
[Cochran, J. (1 September 2015), "ASA Leaders Reminisce: Brad Efron", ''Amstat News''.] He is a past editor (for theory and methods) of the ''
Journal of the American Statistical Association'', and he is the founding editor of the ''
Annals of Applied Statistics''.
Efron is also the recipient of many awards (see below).
Efron is especially known for proposing the
bootstrap resampling technique, which has had a major impact in the field of
statistics
Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, indust ...
and virtually every area of statistical application. The bootstrap was one of the first computer-intensive statistical techniques, replacing traditional
algebra
Algebra () is one of the broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathematics.
Elementary ...
ic derivations with data-based computer simulations.
Life and career
Efron was born in
St. Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul (abbreviated St. Paul) is the capital of the U.S. state of Minnesota and the county seat of Ramsey County. Situated on high bluffs overlooking a bend in the Mississippi River, Saint Paul is a regional business hub and the center o ...
in May 1938, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants Esther and Miles Efron. He attended the
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...
, graduating in Mathematics in 1960. He arrived at
Stanford
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...
in fall of 1960, earning his Ph.D., under the direction of Rupert Miller and
Herbert Solomon
Herbert Solomon (March 13, 1919 – September 20, 2004) was an American statistician. He was a professor emeritus of statistics at Stanford University and co-founder of the university's statistics department. He earned a bachelor's degree from t ...
, in the Department of Statistics. While at Stanford, he was suspended for six months for his involvement with the ''
Stanford Chaparrals parody of ''
Playboy
''Playboy'' is an American men's Lifestyle magazine, lifestyle and entertainment magazine, formerly in print and currently online. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from H ...
'' magazine.
He is currently a Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at Stanford. At Stanford he has been the Chair of the Department of Statistics, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, Chairman of the University Advisory Board, Chair of the Faculty Senate, and Co-director of the undergraduate-level Mathematical & Computational Science Program.
Efron holds the Max H. Stein endowed chair as Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.
He has made many important contributions to many areas of statistics. Efron's work has spanned both theoretical and applied topics, including empirical Bayes analysis (with
Carl Morris), applications of
differential geometry
Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and mult ...
to
statistical inference
Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers properti ...
, the analysis of survival data, and inference for microarray gene expression data. He is the author of a classic monograph, ''The Jackknife, the Bootstrap and Other Resampling Plans'' (1982) and has also co-authored (with
Robert Tibshirani
Robert Tibshirani (born July 10, 1956) is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University. He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1985 to 1998. In his work, he develops statistical ...
) the text ''An Introduction to the Bootstrap'' (1994).
He created a set of
intransitive dice
A set of dice is intransitive (or nontransitive) if it contains three dice, ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'', with the property that ''A'' rolls higher than ''B'' more than half the time, and ''B'' rolls higher than ''C'' more than half the time, but it i ...
called
Efron's dice.
Awards
He has been given many honors, including a
MacArthur Prize Fellowship, membership in the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...
and the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
, fellowship in the
Institute of Mathematical Statistics
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...
(IMS) and the
American Statistical Association
The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...
(ASA), the
Lester R. Ford Award, the
Wilks Medal, the Parzen Prize, and the
Rao Prize,
Fisher
Fisher is an archaic term for a fisherman, revived as gender-neutral.
Fisher, Fishers or The Fisher may also refer to:
Places
Australia
*Division of Fisher, an electoral district in the Australian House of Representatives, in Queensland
*Elect ...
, Rietz, and Wald lecturer.
In 2005, he was awarded the
National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor by the United States, for his exceptional work in the field of Statistics (especially for his inventing of the bootstrapping methodology). He was presented with the award on May 29, 2007.
In 2014, he was awarded the
Guy Medal
The Guy Medals are awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in three categories; Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Silver and Bronze medals are awarded annually. The Gold Medal was awarded every three years between 1987 and 2011, but is awarded biennia ...
in Gold.
He has won the
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category jointly with
David Cox, for the development of “pioneering and hugely influential” statistical methods that have proved indispensable for obtaining reliable results in a vast spectrum of disciplines from medicine to astrophysics, genomics, and particle physics.
He received the
International Prize in Statistics at the 2019
World Statistics Congress.
Selected publications
*
*
* Efron, B. (1979)
"Computer and the theory of statistics: thinking the unthinkable" ''SIAM Review''.
*
* Efron, B. (1982)
"The jackknife, the bootstrap, and other resampling plans" ''Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics CBMS-NSF Monographs'', 38.
*
Diaconis, P. & Efron, B. (1983). "Computer-intensive methods in statistics". ''
Scientific American
''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...
'', May, 116-130.
* Efron, B. (1983). "Estimating the error rate of a prediction rule: improvement on cross-validation". ''Journal of the American Statistical Association''
* Efron, B. (1985). "Bootstrap confidence intervals for a class of parametric problems." ''
Biometrika
''Biometrika'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Oxford University Press for thBiometrika Trust The editor-in-chief is Paul Fearnhead ( Lancaster University). The principal focus of this journal is theoretical statistics. It was ...
''.
* Efron, B. (1987). "Better bootstrap confidence intervals". ''Journal of the American Statistical Association''
* Efron, B. (1990). "More efficient bootstrap computations". ''Journal of the American Statistical Association''
* Efron, B. (1991). "Regression percentiles using asymmetric squared error loss". ''Statistica sinica''.
* Efron, B. (1992). "Jackknife-after-bootstrap standards errors and influence functions". in ''
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society''
* Efron, B., & Tibshirani, R. J. (1993). "An introduction to the bootstrap". New York: Chapman & Hall
software
*
*
See also
*
Clinical trials
Clinical trials are prospective biomedical or behavioral research studies on human participants designed to answer specific questions about biomedical or behavioral interventions, including new treatments (such as novel vaccines, drugs, dieta ...
*
Empirical Bayesian
*
Fisher, Ronald
*
Least-angle regression
In statistics, least-angle regression (LARS) is an algorithm for fitting linear regression models to high-dimensional data, developed by Bradley Efron, Trevor Hastie, Iain Johnstone and Robert Tibshirani.
Suppose we expect a response variab ...
*
Fisher information
*
Hinkley, David V.
*
Likelihood function
The likelihood function (often simply called the likelihood) represents the probability of random variable realizations conditional on particular values of the statistical parameters. Thus, when evaluated on a given sample, the likelihood functi ...
*
Observed information
In statistics, the observed information, or observed Fisher information, is the negative of the second derivative (the Hessian matrix) of the " log-likelihood" (the logarithm of the likelihood function). It is a sample-based version of the Fish ...
*
Robbins, Herbert
*
Sequential analysis
*
Stein, Charles
References
External links
* Personal home page: https://efron.ckirby.su.domains
Statistical Science Silver Anniversary issue on Bootstrap, including interview with Efron*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Efron, Bradley
1938 births
American statisticians
American bioinformaticians
Biostatisticians
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Living people
National Medal of Science laureates
MacArthur Fellows
People from Saint Paul, Minnesota
Presidents of the American Statistical Association
Presidents of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
American people of Russian-Jewish descent
Stanford University Department of Statistics faculty