Simply Statistics organized The Future of Statistics Unconference which was streamed live on Oct 30, 2013.
The panelists were
- Hadley Wickham, Statistics, Rice University
- Hilary Mason, Data Scientist in Residence at Accel
- Joe Blitzstein, Statistics, Harvard
- Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Daniela Witten, Biostatistics, University of Washington
- Hongkai Ji, Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4UJjzuYjfM&w=560&h=315]
Roger Peng, one of the organizers of the Unconference, writes about John Tukey’s “The Future of Data Analysis,” published in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics in 1962:
It is interesting, from my perspective, that given how clear and coherent Tukey’s roadmap was in 1962, how much of it was essentially ignored. In fact, the field pretty much went the other direction towards more mathematical elegance (I’m guessing Tukey sensed this would happen). His article is uncomfortable to read, because it’s full of problems that arise in real data that are difficult to handle with standard approaches. He has an uncanny ability to make up methods that look totally bizarre on first glance but are totally reasonable after some thought.
I honestly can’t think of a better way to end this post than to quote Tukey himself.
The future of data analysis can involve great progress, the overcoming of real difficulties, and the provision of a great service to all fields of science and technology. Will it? That remains to us, to our willingness to take up the rocky road of real problems in preference to the smooth road of unreal assumptions, arbitrary criteria, and abstract results without real attachments. Who is for the challenge?
