The Statistical Research Group (SRG) was a research group at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

focused on military problems during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

Abraham Wald Abraham Wald (; hu, Wald Ábrahám, yi, אברהם וואַלד; – ) was a Jewish Hungarian mathematician who contributed to decision theory, geometry, and econometrics and founded the field of statistical sequential analysis. One of ...

, Allen Wallis, Herbert Solomon,

Frederick Mosteller Charles Frederick Mosteller (December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006) was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department from 19 ...

George Stigler George Joseph Stigler (; January 17, 1911 – December 1, 1991) was an American economist. He was the 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and is considered a key leader of the Chicago school of economics. Early life and ...

and

Milton Friedman Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the ...

were all part of the group in which 18 researchers participated. Wallis, Stigler and Friedman met as graduate students at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

. Despite their shared alma mater there is no evidence that Stigler and Friedman had grown close before serving on the SRG staff together in New York City. The SRG was disbanded at the end of World War II.

Background

Statistical analysis Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying distribution of probability.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers propertie ...

was widely used by Federal agencies after the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...

. The statistical publications of the United States became more sophisticated between 1930 and 1940. During the mobilization to war (1940-1941) and continuing on during the war, statistics continued to gain in importance with applications in

operations research Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve deci ...

and

management information systems A management information system (MIS) is an information system used for decision-making, and for the coordination, control, analysis, and visualization of information in an organization. The study of the management information systems involves peop ...

(MIS). The Statistical Control System in the

Air Force An air force – in the broadest sense – is the national military branch that primarily conducts aerial warfare. More specifically, it is the branch of a nation's armed services that is responsible for aerial warfare as distinct from an a ...

developed under Colonel C.B. Thornton, was an example of a wartime MIS. Its mission was to provide "a continuous flow of detailed information on the status of many parts of the Air Force, including personnel, supply, operations, and basic data upon which to base attrition rates, sortie rates, crew rotation rates, maintenance needs, supply rates, etc."

Organization

The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University was supported by the

Applied Mathematics Panel The Applied Mathematics Panel (AMP) was created at the end of 1942 as a division of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) within the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) in order to solve mathematical problems related to t ...

(AMP) or the

National Defense Research Committee The National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was an organization created "to coordinate, supervise, and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development, production, and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare" in the Un ...

(NDRC), part of the

Office of Scientific Research and Development The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was an agency of the United States federal government created to coordinate scientific research for military purposes during World War II. Arrangements were made for its creation during May 1 ...

(OSRD).

History

While teaching at Stanford during the war years, Allen Wallis wrote to a friend at the Census Bureau:

Those of us teaching statistics in various departments here are trying to work out a curriculum adapted to the immediate statistical requirements of the war. It seems probably that a good many students with research training might by training in statistics become more useful for war than in their present work, or might increase their usefulness within their present fields."

Friedman wrote an appendix called "A Cautionary Tale about Multiple Regressions" that was published in ''Alternative Approaches to Analyzing Economic Data'' in which he says that, as a researcher at SRG, he constructed two new

alloys An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductility, ...

to be used in

aircraft engines An aircraft engine, often referred to as an aero engine, is the power component of an aircraft propulsion system. Most aircraft engines are either piston engines or gas turbines, although a few have been rocket powered and in recent years many ...

. His work was based on a

regression model 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 ...

that made use of data on existing alloys. Using this model he predicted that it would take several hundred hours for the new alloys to rupture at high temperatures.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Statistical Research Group of World War II Statistical organizations United States home front during World War II Columbia University Technical intelligence during World War II