Leo Breiman (January 27, 1928 – July 5, 2005) was a distinguished
statistician at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and was a member of the
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
.
Breiman's work helped to bridge the gap between statistics and
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
, particularly in the field of
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
. His most important contributions were his work on
classification and regression trees and ensembles of trees fit to
bootstrap samples.
Bootstrap aggregation was given the name
''bagging'' by Breiman. Another of Breiman's ensemble approaches is the
random forest.
See also
*
Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem
In information theory, the asymptotic equipartition property (AEP) is a general property of the output samples of a stochastic source. It is fundamental to the concept of typical set used in theories of data compression.
Roughly speaking, the th ...
Further reading
* Leo Breima
obituary from the University of California, Berkeley
* Richard Olshen
A Conversation with Leo Breiman" Statistical Science Volume 16, Issue 2, 2001
*
Random Forests
External links
*
Leo Breimanfro
A video record
of a Leo Breiman's lecture about one of his machine learning techniques
Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures
(with comments and a rejoinder by the author)
1928 births
2005 deaths
American statisticians
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Machine learning researchers
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty
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