Colin Lingwood Mallows (born 10 September 1930, Great Sampford,

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 ''C_p'', 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, a popular clustering validation criterion.

Education and career

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 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 research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

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 from 1960 to 1995 and then for AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey from 1995 to 2000, when he retired. Since 2000, Mallows has been a consultant for Avaya Labs. He is the author or coauthor of about 140 research publications.

Honors and awards

Mallows was awarded the R. A. Fisher Lectureship in 1997, the

Deming Lectureship Deming may refer to: People * Deming (surname) * Deming (given name) Places United States * Deming, Indiana * Deming, New Mexico * Deming, Washington * Deming Lake, a lake in Minnesota Other uses * Deming circle, an iterative management met ...

in 2004, and the

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 branc ...

, 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.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mallows, Colin Lingwood 1930 births Living people Alumni of University College London Scientists at Bell Labs English statisticians Academics of University College London AT&T people Avaya employees 20th-century English mathematicians People from Essex