15 July 1924-18 January 2022
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIR DAVID COX! Today is David Cox’s birthday, he would have been 98 years old today. Below is a remembrance I contributed to Significance when he died, with a link to others in that same issue.
“In celebrating Cox’s immense contributions, we should recognise how much there is yet to learn from him” Continue reading
Yesterday’s event video recording is available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mWYbcVflyE&t=10s
European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) Webinar:
Statistical Significance and p-values
→ Europe/Amsterdam (CET); 08:00-09:30 am (EST)
ENBIS will dedicate this webinar to the memory of Sir David Cox, who sadly passed away in January 2022.
In June 2011, Sir David Cox agreed to a very informal ‘interview’ on the topics of the 2010 workshop that I co-ran at the London School of Economics (CPNSS), Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science, where he was a speaker. Soon after I began taping, Cox stopped me in order to show me how to do a proper interview. He proceeded to ask me questions, beginning with:
COX: Deborah, in some fields foundations do not seem very important, but we both think foundations of statistical inference are important; why do you think that is?
MAYO: I think because they ask about fundamental questions of evidence, inference, and probability. I don’t think that foundations of different fields are all alike; because in statistics we’re so intimately connected to the scientific interest in learning about the world, we invariably cross into philosophical questions about empirical knowledge and inductive inference.
Hinkley, Reid & Cox
Here’s an in-depth interview of Sir David Cox by Nancy Reid that brings out a rare, intellectual understanding and appreciation of some of Cox’s work. Only someone truly in the know could have managed to elicit these fascinating reflections. The interview was in Oct 1993, published in 1994.
Nancy Reid (1994). A Conversation with Sir David Cox, Statistical Science 9(3): 439-455.
Sir David Cox: July 15, 1924-Jan 18, 2022
The original Statistics Views interview is here:
“I would like to think of myself as a scientist, who happens largely to specialise in the use of statistics”– An interview with Sir David Cox
FEATURES
- Author: Statistics Views
- Date: 24 Jan 2014
Sir David Cox is arguably one of the world’s leading living statisticians. He has made pioneering and important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability over the years, of which perhaps the best known is the proportional hazards model, which is widely used in the analysis of survival data. The Cox point process was named after him. Continue reading
Sir David Cox speaking at the RSS meeting in a session: “Significance Tests: Rethinking the Controversy” on 5 September 2018.
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2018 will mark 60 years since the famous chestnut from Sir David Cox (1958). The example “is now usually called the ‘weighing machine example,’ which draws attention to the need for conditioning, at least in certain types of problems” (Reid 1992, p. 582). When I describe it, you’ll find it hard to believe many regard it as causing an earthquake in statistical foundations, unless you’re already steeped in these matters. A simple version: If half the time I reported my weight from a scale that’s always right, and half the time use a scale that gets it right with probability .5, would you say I’m right with probability ¾? Well, maybe. But suppose you knew that this measurement was made with the scale that’s right with probability .5? The overall error probability is scarcely relevant for giving the warrant of the particular measurement, knowing which scale was used. So what’s the earthquake? First a bit more on the chestnut. Here’s an excerpt from Cox and Mayo (2010, 295-8): Continue reading
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A famous chestnut given by Cox (1958) recently came up in conversation. The example “is now usually called the ‘weighing machine example,’ which draws attention to the need for conditioning, at least in certain types of problems” (Reid 1992, p. 582). When I describe it, you’ll find it hard to believe many regard it as causing an earthquake in statistical foundations, unless you’re already steeped in these matters. If half the time I reported my weight from a scale that’s always right, and half the time use a scale that gets it right with probability .5, would you say I’m right with probability ¾? Well, maybe. But suppose you knew that this measurement was made with the scale that’s right with probability .5? The overall error probability is scarcely relevant for giving the warrant of the particular measurement,knowing which scale was used. Continue reading
Erich Lehmann 20 November 1917 – 12 September 2009
Memory Lane 1 Year (with update): Today is Erich Lehmann’s birthday. The last time I saw him was at the Second Lehmann conference in 2004, at which I organized a session on philosophical foundations of statistics (including David Freedman and D.R. Cox).
I got to know Lehmann, Neyman’s first student, in 1997. One day, I received a bulging, six-page, handwritten letter from him in tiny, extremely neat scrawl (and many more after that). He told me he was sitting in a very large room at an ASA meeting where they were shutting down the conference book display (or maybe they were setting it up), and on a very long, dark table sat just one book, all alone, shiny red. He said he wondered if it might be of interest to him! So he walked up to it…. It turned out to be my Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (1996, Chicago), which he reviewed soon after. Some related posts on Lehmann’s letter are here and here.
That same year I remember having a last-minute phone call with Erich to ask how best to respond to a “funny Bayesian example” raised by Colin Howson. It is essentially the case of Mary’s positive result for a disease, where Mary is selected randomly from a population where the disease is very rare. See for example here. (It’s just like the case of our high school student Isaac). His recommendations were extremely illuminating, and with them he sent me a poem he’d written (which you can read in my published response here*). Aside from being a leading statistician, Erich had a (serious) literary bent. Continue reading
Sir David Cox
The original Statistics Views interview is here:
“I would like to think of myself as a scientist, who happens largely to specialise in the use of statistics”– An interview with Sir David Cox
FEATURES
- Author: Statistics Views
- Date: 24 Jan 2014
- Copyright: Image appears courtesy of Sir David Cox
Sir David Cox is arguably one of the world’s leading living statisticians. He has made pioneering and important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability over the years, of which perhaps the best known is the proportional hazards model, which is widely used in the analysis of survival data. The Cox point process was named after him.
Sir David studied mathematics at St John’s College, Cambridge and obtained his PhD from the University of Leeds in 1949. He was employed from 1944 to 1946 at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, from 1946 to 1950 at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds, and from 1950 to 1955 worked at the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. From 1956 to 1966 he was Reader and then Professor of Statistics at Birkbeck College, London. In 1966, he took up the Chair position in Statistics at Imperial College Londonwhere he later became Head of the Department of Mathematics for a period. In 1988 he became Warden of Nuffield College and was a member of the Department of Statistics at Oxford University. He formally retired from these positions in 1994 but continues to work in Oxford.
Sir David has received numerous awards and honours over the years. He has been awarded the Guy Medals in Silver (1961) and Gold (1973) by the Royal Statistical Society. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1973, was knighted in 1985 and became an Honorary Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. In 1990 he won the Kettering Prize and Gold Medal for Cancer Research for “the development of the Proportional Hazard Regression Model” and 2010 he was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society.
He has supervised and collaborated with many students over the years, many of whom are now successful in statistics in their own right such as David Hinkley and Past President of the Royal Statistical Society, Valerie Isham. Sir David has served as President of theBernoulli Society, Royal Statistical Society, and the International Statistical Institute.
This year, Sir David is to turn 90*. Here Statistics Views talks to Sir David about his prestigious career in statistics, working with the late Professor Lindley, his thoughts on Jeffreys and Fisher, being President of the Royal Statistical Society during the Thatcher Years, Big Data and the best time of day to think of statistical methods.
1. With an educational background in mathematics at St Johns College, Cambridge and the University of Leeds, when and how did you first become aware of statistics as a discipline?
I was studying at Cambridge during the Second World War and after two years, one was sent either into the Forces or into some kind of military research establishment. There were very few statisticians then, although it was realised there was a need for statisticians. It was assumed that anybody who was doing reasonably well at mathematics could pick up statistics in a week or so! So, aged 20, I went to the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, which is enormous and still there to this day if in a different form, and I worked in the Department of Structural and Mechanical Engineering, doing statistical work. So statistics was forced upon me, so to speak, as was the case for many mathematicians at the time because, aside from UCL, there had been very little teaching of statistics in British universities before the Second World War. Afterwards, it all started to expand.
2. From 1944 to 1946 you worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and then from 1946 to 1950 at the Wool Industries Research Association in Leeds. Did statistics have any role to play in your first roles out of university?
Totally. In Leeds, it was largely statistics but also to some extent, applied mathematics because there were all sorts of problems connected with the wool and textile industry in terms of the physics, chemistry and biology of the wool and some of these problems were mathematical but the great majority had a statistical component to them. That experience was not totally uncommon at the time and many who became academic statisticians had, in fact, spent several years working in a research institute first.
3. From 1950 to 1955, you worked at the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge and would have been there at the same time as Fisher and Jeffreys. The late Professor Dennis Lindley, who was also there at that time, told me that the best people working on statistics were not in the statistics department at that time. What are your memories when you look back on that time and what do you feel were your main achievements?
Lindley was exactly right about Jeffreys and Fisher. They were two great scientists outside statistics – Jeffreys founded modern geophysics and Fisher was a major figure in genetics. Dennis was a contemporary and very impressive and effective. We were colleagues for five years and our children even played together.
The first lectures on statistics I attended as a student consisted of a short course by Harold Jeffreys who had at the time a massive reputation as virtually the inventor of modern geophysics. His Theory of Probability, published first as a monograph in physics was and remains of great importance but, amongst other things, his nervousness limited the appeal of his lectures, to put it gently. I met him personally a couple of times – he was friendly but uncommunicative. When I was later at the Statistical Laboratory in Cambridge, relations between the Director, Dr Wishart and R.A. Fisher had been at a very low ebb for 20 years and contact between the Lab and Fisher was minimal. I hear him speak on three of four occasions, interesting if often rambunctious occasions. To some, Fisher showed great generosity but not to the Statistics Lab, which was sad in view of the towering importance of his work.
“To some, Fisher showed great generosity but not to the Statistics Lab, which was sad in view of the towering importance of his work.”
Experts convene to explore new philosophy of statistics field
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