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S.S. Wilks Memorial Lecture
Abstract: The year 2013 marks the 250th anniversary of Bayes rule. The rule has been influential over the entire period, and controversial over most of it. It's reliance on prior beliefs has been challenged by frequentist methods, which focus instead on the behavior of specific estimates and tests. The bootstrap helps connect the two philosophies, particularly when Bayes inference is based on "uninformative" priors. Some examples will be used to illustrate the connection, without much in the way of theory.
Biography: Bradley Efron is an American statistician best known for proposing the bootstrap resampling technique, which has had a major impact in the field of statistics and virtually every area of statistical application. He is currently a Professor of Statistics at Stanford, where he has been the Chair of the Department of Statistics, Associate Dean of Science, Chairman of the University Advisory Board, Chair of the Faculty Senate and Chair of the Undergraduate Program in Applied Mathematics. He holds the Max H. Stein endowed chair as Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.
Efron has made many important contributions to many areas of statistics. His work has spanned both theoretical and applied topics, including empirical Bayes analysis (with Carl Morris), applications of differential geometry to statistical inference, 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 R. Tibshirani) the text An Introduction to the Bootstrap (1994). He created a set of nontransitive dice called Efron"s dice.
Efron has won many honors, including a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) and the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Wilks Medal, the Parzen Prize, and the Rao Prize, Fisher, 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