Robert Tibshirani (born July 10, 1956) is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

. He was a professor at the University of Toronto from 1985 to 1998. In his work, he develops statistical tools for the analysis of complex datasets, most recently in

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

and

proteomics Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital parts of living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replication of DNA. In ...

. His most well-known contributions are the Lasso method, which proposed the use of L¹ penalization in regression and related problems, and

Significance Analysis of Microarrays Microarray analysis techniques are used in interpreting the data generated from experiments on DNA (Gene chip analysis), RNA, and protein microarrays, which allow researchers to investigate the expression state of a large number of genes - in many ...

Education and early life

Tibshirani was born on 10 July 1956 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. He received his B. Math. in statistics and computer science from the University of Waterloo in 1979 and a Master's degree in Statistics from University of Toronto in 1980. Tibshirani joined the doctoral program at

in 1981 and received his Ph.D. in 1984 under the supervision of Bradley Efron. His dissertation was entitled "Local likelihood estimation".

Honors and awards

Tibshirani received the

COPSS Presidents' Award The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. The COPSS Presidents' Award is generally ...

in 1996. Given jointly by the world's leading statistical societies, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to statistics by a statistician under the age of 40. He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association. He won an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

in 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

in 2001 and a member of 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 Nati ...

in 2012. Tibshirani was made the 2012 Statistical Society of Canada's Gold Medalist at their yearly meeting in Guelph, Ontario for "exceptional contributions to methodology and theory for the analysis of complex data sets, smoothing and regression methodology, statistical learning, and classification, and application areas that include public health, genomics, and proteomics". He gave his Gold Medal Address at the 2013 meeting in Edmonton. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2019. Tibshirani was named as the 2021 recipient of the ISI Founders of Statistics Prize for his 1996 paper Regression Shrinkage and Selection via the Lasso.

Personal life

His son, Ryan Tibshirani, with whom he occasionally publishes scientific papers, is a professor at UC Berkeley in the Department of Statistics.

Publications

Tibshirani is a prolific author of scientific works on various topics in applied statistics, including

statistical learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

, data mining,

statistical computing Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the bond between statistics and computer science. It means statistical methods that are enabled by using computational methods. It is the area of computational science (or scientific computin ...

, and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

. He along with his collaborators has authored about 250 scientific articles. Many of Tibshirani's scientific articles were coauthored by his longtime collaborator, Trevor Hastie. Tibshirani is one of the most ISI Highly Cited Authors in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge. He has coauthored the following books: * T. Hastie and R. Tibshirani, ''Generalized Additive Models'', Chapman and Hall, 1990. * B. Efron and R. Tibshirani, ''An Introduction to the Bootstrap'', Chapman and Hall, 1993 * T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman, ''The Elements of Statistical Learning: Prediction, Inference and Data Mining'', Second Edition, Springer Verlag, 2009 (available for free from the co-author's website). * G. James, D. Witten, T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, ''An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R'', Springer Verlag, 2013 (available for free from the co-author's website). * T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, M. Wainwright, ''Statistical Learning with Sparsity: the Lasso and Generalizations'', CRC Press, 2015 (available for free from the co-author's website).

References

External links