One highlight of my fall semester is going to be a statistics journal club led by CMU’s Ryan Tibshirani together with his dad Rob Tibshirani (here on sabbatical from Stanford). The journal club will focus on “Hot Ideas in Statistics“: some classic papers that aren’t covered in standard courses, and some newer papers on hot or developing areas. I’m hoping to find time to blog about several of the papers we discuss.
The first paper was Leo Breiman’s “Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures” (2001) with discussion and rejoinder. This is a very readable, high-level paper about the culture of statistical education and practice, rather than about technical details. I strongly encourage you to read it yourself.
Breiman’s article is quite provocative, encouraging statisticians to downgrade the role of traditional mainstream statistics in favor of a more machine-learning approach. Breiman calls the two approaches “data modeling” and “algorithmic modeling”: Continue reading ““Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures,” Breiman”