Great Sampford
Great Sampford is a village and civil parish on the junction of the B1053 and B1051 roads in the north-west of the English county of Essex. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 Census was 586. The village includes a primary school, ...
,
Essex
Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...
) is an English statistician, who has worked in the United States since 1960. He is known for Mallows's ''Cp'', a regression model diagnostic procedure, widely used in
regression analysis
In statistical modeling, regression analysis is a set of statistical processes for estimating the relationships between a dependent variable (often called the 'outcome' or 'response' variable, or a 'label' in machine learning parlance) and one ...
and the
Fowlkes–Mallows index
The Fowlkes–Mallows index is an external evaluation method that is used to determine the similarity between two clusterings (clusters obtained after a clustering algorithm), and also a metric to measure confusion matrices. This measure of simi ...
Mallows received in 1951 his bachelor's degree and in 1953 his Ph.D. (at the age of 22) from
University College London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = ...
(UCL) under
Florence Nightingale David
Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David (23 August 1909 – 23 July 1993) was an English statistician. She was head of the Statistics Department at the University of California, Riverside between 1970 – 77 and her research inte ...
and
Norman Lloyd Johnson
Norman Lloyd Johnson (9 January 1917, Ilford, Essex, England – 18 November 2004, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States) was a professor of statistics and author or editor of several standard reference works in statistics and probabil ...
with thesis ''Some problems connected with distribution problems.'' Mallows joined the UCL faculty and taught there from 1955 to 1959 with a sabbatical year at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...
in the academic year 1957–1958. He worked for
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
in
Murray Hill, New Jersey
Murray Hill is an unincorporated community located within portions of both Berkeley Heights and New Providence, located in Union County in northern New Jersey, United States.
It is the longtime central location of Bell Labs (part of Nokia si ...
from 1960 to 1995 and then for
AT&T Labs
AT&T Labs is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster NJ; Middletown, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Warrenville, IL; Austin, TX; Dallas, TX; Atla ...
in
Florham Park, New Jersey
Florham Park is a borough in Morris County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States census, the borough's population was 11,696,Avaya Labs. He is the author or coauthor of about 140 research publications.
Honors and awards
Mallows was awarded the
R. A. Fisher Lectureship
The COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship (formerly known as R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship) is a very high recognition of achievement and scholarship in statistical science that recognizes the highly significant impact of stat ...
Wilks Memorial Award
The Wilks Memorial Award is awarded by the American Statistical Association to recognize outstanding contributions to statistics. It was established in 1964 and is awarded yearly. It is named in memory of the statistician Samuel S. Wilks. The awa ...
in 2007. Mallows and
George Box
George Edward Pelham Box (18 October 1919 – 28 March 2013) was a British statistician, who worked in the areas of quality control, time-series analysis, design of experiments, and Bayesian inference. He has been called "one of the g ...
are the only two statisticians to have received all three of those honours.
Mallows solved a $10,000 mathematical problem posed by
John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches ...
, but declined the prize money on the grounds that the problem was too easy.
Selected publications
*"Generalizations of Tchebycheff's inequalities." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) (1956): 139–176.
*with David E. Barton: "The randomization bases of the problem of the amalgamation of weighted means." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) (1961): 423–433. "Latent vectors of random symmetric matrices." Biometrika 48, no. 1–2 (1961): 133–149.
*with D. E. Barton: "Some aspects of the random sequence." The Annals of Mathematical Statistics (1965): 236–260.
*"An even simpler proof of Opal's inequality." Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 16 (1965): 173.
*with H. L. Frisch and F. A. Bovey. "On the stereoregularity of vinyl polymer chains." The Journal of Chemical Physics 45, no. 5 (1966): 1565–1577.
*with John Riordan: "The inversion enumerator for labeled trees." Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 74 (1968): 92–94.
*With William H. Williams: "Systematic biases in panel surveys due to differential nonresponse." Journal of the American Statistical Association 65, no. 331 (1970): 1338–1349.
*with David F. Andrews: "Scale mixtures of normal distributions." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) (1974): 99–102.
*with John M. Chambers and B. W. Stuck: "A method for simulating stable random variables." Journal of the American Statistical Association 71, no. 354 (1976): 340–344.
*"Robust methods—some examples of their use." The American Statistician 33, no. 4 (1979): 179–184.
*with Edward B. Fowlkes: "A method for comparing two hierarchical clusterings." Journal of the American Statistical Association 78, no. 383 (1983): 553–569.
*with Siddharta R. Dalal: "When should one stop testing software?." Journal of the American Statistical Association 83, no. 403 (1988): 872–879.
*with David Draper, James S. Hodges, and Daryl Pregibon: "Exchangeability and data analysis." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (Statistics in Society) (1993): 9–37.
*with S. R. Dalal: "Factor-covering designs for testing software." Technometrics 40, no. 3 (1998): 234–243.
*Lorraine Denby, James M. Landwehr, Jean Meloche, John Tuck, Bowei Xi, George Michailidis, and Vijayan N. Nair: "Statistical aspects of the analysis of data networks." Technometrics 49, no. 3 (2007): 318–334.