Adele Cutler is a statistician known as one of the developers of archetypal analysis and of the

random forest Random forests or random decision forests is an ensemble learning method for classification, regression and other tasks that operates by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time. For classification tasks, the output of th ...

technique for ensemble learning. She is a professor of mathematics and statistics at Utah State University.

Early life and education

Originally from England, Cutler moved to New Zealand as a child, and studied mathematics at the University of Waikato and the University of Auckland. She met her husband, statistician Richard Cutler, at the University of Auckland; the couple both went on to graduate study in statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a master's degree in 1984 and completed her doctorate in 1988. Her dissertation, ''Optimization Methods in Statistics'', was supervised by

Leo Breiman Leo Breiman (January 27, 1928 – July 5, 2005) was a distinguished statistician at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences. ...

. Her doctoral work with Breiman concerned

mathematical optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

techniques in statistics, and introduced archetypal analysis.

Career

After completing her doctorate she joined the faculty at Utah State University in 1988. Her initial research there concerned mixture models, but shifted towards

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

s in the mid-1990s and from there to random

decision tree A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains condit ...

s, the basis of the random forest technique.

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Cutler, Adele Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American women statisticians English statisticians New Zealand statisticians University of Waikato alumni University of Auckland alumni UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni Utah State University faculty 21st-century American women