David John Hand (born 30 June 1950 in

Peterborough Peterborough ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city in the City of Peterborough district in the Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county of Cambridgeshire, England. The city is north of London, on the River Nene. A ...

)Prof David Hand Authorised Biography
at Debrett's ''People of Today''. Accessed 27 January 2011. is a British

statistician A statistician is a person who works with Theory, theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private sector, private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, a ...

. His research interests include

multivariate statistics Multivariate statistics is a subdivision of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one outcome variable, i.e., '' multivariate random variables''. Multivariate statistics concerns understanding the differ ...

, classification methods,

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...

computational statistics Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the study which is the intersection of statistics and computer science, and refers to the statistical methods that are enabled by using computational methods. It is the area of computational ...

and the

foundations of statistics The Foundations of Statistics are the mathematical and philosophical bases for statistical methods. These bases are the theoretical frameworks that ground and justify methods of statistical inference, estimation, hypothesis testing, uncertainty ...

. He has written technical books on statistics, data mining, finance, classification methods, and measuring wellbeing, as well as science popularisation books including ''The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day''; ''Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters''; and ''Statistics: A Very Short Introduction''. In 1991 he launched the journal '' Statistics and Computing''.

Education

Hand was educated at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

and the

University of Southampton The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...

where he was awarded a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1977 for research supervised by .

Career and research

Hand served as professor of statistics at the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a Public university, public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by List of universities in the United Kingdom by enrolment, number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate ...

from 1988 until 1999, when he moved to

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

, where he is now

Emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". In some c ...

Professor of Mathematics. Between 2010 and 2018 he took an extended

sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work; "an extended period of time intentionally spent on something that’s not your routine job." The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Bi ...

to serve as chief scientific advisor at Winton Capital Management. He served as president of the

Royal Statistical Society The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is an established statistical society. It has three main roles: a British learned society for statistics, a professional body for statisticians and a charity which promotes statistics for the public good. ...

from 2008 to 2009, then again in 2010 after Bernard Silverman stood down.

Books

Hand has published 31 books, inter alia: * 2001. ''Principles of Data Mining''(with Mannila H. and Smyth P). ''Principles of Data Mining''. MIT Press. * 2007. ''Measurement Theory and Practice: the World Through Quantification'' * 2014. (with Paul Allin). ''The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive and Measurement''. Wiley.(with Paul Allin). ''The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive and Measurement''. Wiley. * 2014. ''The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen All the Time''''The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen All the Time''. Farrar Straus Giroux. * 2020. ''From GDP to Sustainable Wellbeing: Changing Statistics or Changing Lives?'' 2020. (with Paul Allin) ''From GDP to Sustainable Wellbeing: Changing Statistics or Changing Lives?'' Palgrave Macmillan, * 2020. ''Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters''Dark Data: Why What You Don’t Know Matters

Articles

Hand has published over 300 scientific articles, inter alia: * Hand D.J. and Henley W.E. (1997) Statistical classification methods in consumer credit scoring: a review. ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'', Series A, 160, 523-541 * Hand D.J., Blunt G., Kelly M.G., and Adams N.M. (2000) Data mining for fun and profit. ''Statistical Science'', 15, 111-131 * Hand D.J. and Yu K. (2001) Idiot's Bayes - not so stupid after all? ''International Statistical Review'', 69, 385-398 * Bolton R.J. and Hand D.J. (2002) Statistical fraud detection: a review. ''Statistical Science'', 17, 235-255 * Hand D.J. (2006) Classifier technology and the illusion of progress (with discussion). ''Statistical Science'', 21, 1-34 * 2008. ''Top 10 algorithms in data mining''with Ross Quinlan, Qiang Yang, Philip S. Yu and Zhou Zhihua et al.. ''Knowledge and Information Systems'' 14.1: 1-37 * Hand D.J. (2009) Measuring classifier performance: a coherent alternative to the area under the ROC curve. ''Machine Learning'', 77, 103-123 * Hand D.J. (2018) Statistical challenges of administrative and transaction data (with discussion). ''Journal of the Royal Statistical Society'', Series A, 181, 555-605

Awards and honours

Hand has received various awards for his work, including being elected Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries in 1999, the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society in 2002, the IEEE ICDM Outstanding Contributions Award in 2004, the Credit Collections and Risk Award for Contributions to the Credit Industry in 2012, the George Box Medal for Business and Industrial Statistics in 2016, and the International Federation of Classification Societies Research Medal in 2019. He was appointed

Officer of the Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

(OBE) in the

2013 New Year Honours The New Year Honours 2013 were appointments by some of the 16 Commonwealth realms to various orders and honours to recognise and reward good works by citizens of those countries. The New Year Honours are awarded as part of the New Year celebrati ...

for services to research and innovation. He was elected a

Fellow of the British Academy Fellowship of the British Academy (post-nominal letters FBA) is an award granted by the British Academy to leading academics for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. The categories are: # Fellows – scholars resident in t ...

(FBA) in 2003. In April 2013 until June 2021 he served on the board of the board of the

UK Statistics Authority The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA, ) is a non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for oversight of the Office for National Statistics, maintaining a national code of practice for official statist ...

as a non-executive director and served on the European Statistical Advisory Committee, advising the European Commission from 2016 to 2021. He chaired the Administrative Data Research Network from 2014 to 2017 and serves on many other advisory committees, including chairing the Advisory Board of the ONS's Centre for Applied Data Ethics and the National Statistician's Expert User Advisory Committee.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hand, David Living people 1950 births Officers of the Order of the British Empire People from Peterborough Presidents of the Royal Statistical Society Fellows of the British Academy Academics of the Open University Academics of Imperial College London Alumni of Christ Church, Oxford Alumni of the University of Southampton British mathematical statisticians Computational statisticians Data miners