Sir David Cox: 15, July 1924-18 January, 2022
Today is Sir David Cox’s birthday. He would have been 99 today. 2023 marks the first year that the David R. Cox Award in Foundations of Statistics will be given at the upcoming Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) in Toronto. For information on the Award, see this post. I’m excited to announce the inaugural winner, Nancy Reid! She will speak on “The Importance of Foundations in Statistical Science” Wednesday August 9: 10:30-12:20. The day before, Tuesday August 8: 9:35-9:50 am., I will give a brief talk on “Sir David Cox’s Statistical Philosophy“. The abstracts and locations for the two talks are below.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVID COX!
Wednesday August 9 10:30-12:20: David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Award
Metro Toronto Convention Centre
Room: CC-701A
Ronald Wasserstein, Chair (American Statistical Association)
Nancy Reid Speaker, First recipient of Award (University of Toronto)
“The Importance of Foundations in Statistical Science“
Nancy Reid
ABSTRACT: David Cox wrote “A healthy interplay between theory and application is crucial for statistics… This is particularly the case when by theory we mean foundations of statistical analysis, rather than the theoretical analysis of specific statistical methods.” These foundations distinguish statistical science from the many fields of research in which statistical thinking is a key intellectual component. In this talk I will emphasize the ongoing importance and relevance of theoretical advances and theoretical thinking through some illustrative examples.
Tuesday, August 8, 9:35-9:50 am: CC-201D.
Speaker: D. Mayo
Sir David Cox’s Statistical Philosophy and its Relevance to Today’s Statistical Controversies
I sketch Sir David Cox’s views of the nature and importance of statistical foundations and their relevance to today’s controversies about statistical inference. Two key themes of Cox’s statistical philosophy are: first, the importance of calibrating methods by considering their behavior in (actual or hypothetical) repeated sampling, and second, ensuring the calibration is relevant to the specific data and inquiry. A question that arises is: How can the frequentist calibration provide a genuinely inferential or evidential assessment of what is learned from data? I will discuss the answers that emerge from Cox’s work and our jointly written papers, Mayo and Cox (2006) and Cox and Mayo (2010) on statistical significance testing, objectivity in statistics, and conditioning.
- Mayo, D. and Cox, D. (2006) Frequentist statistics as a theory of inductive inference. In J. Rojo (ed.), Optimality, IMS Lecture Notes 49 (77–97), IMS.
- Cox, D. and Mayo, D. (2010) Objectivity and conditionality in frequentist inference. In D. Mayo and A. Spanos (eds), Error and Inference, (276-304), CUP.
Donations for the David R. Cox Foundations of Statistics Award will be matched for the next few months.
Become a “friend” of Sir David R. Cox: During the matching period (up to September 30, 2023), your award will be matched by the donor. With a $50 donation (until 10/1/23), your award automatically reaches the $100 required to be listed as a “friend” of David R. Cox. Here is the link:
Error Statistics Philosophy 
Your presentation on Tuesday is in CC-201D not 210D if the official program is correct.
Oops! I hope that people found it from the program.
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