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

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

. He was a professor at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

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 molecular 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, ...

and

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

. 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.

Education and early life

Tibshirani was born on 10 July 1956 in

Niagara Falls, Ontario Niagara Falls is a city in Ontario, Canada, adjacent to, and named after, Niagara Falls. As of the Canada 2021 Census, 2021 census, the city had a population of 94,415. The city is located on the Niagara Peninsula along the western bank of the ...

, Canada. He received his B. Math. in statistics and computer science from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

in 1979 and a Master's degree in Statistics from the

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 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 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 continuous ...

. 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; , CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering research in Canada. NSERC directly funds university professors and students as ...

in 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , 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, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

in 2001 and a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, 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 ...

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 The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...

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 study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

, statistical computing, and

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

. 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