Robert Tibshirani (born July 10, 1956) is a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

. He was a professor at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

from 1985 to 1998. In his work, he develops statistical tools for the analysis of complex datasets, most recently in

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, three-dim ...

and

proteomics Proteomics is the large-scale study of proteins. Proteins are vital parts of living organisms, with many functions such as the formation of structural fibers of muscle tissue, enzymatic digestion of food, or synthesis and replication of DNA. In ...

. His most well-known contributions are the Lasso method, which proposed the use of L¹ penalization in regression and related problems, and Significance Analysis of Microarrays.

Education and early life

Tibshirani was born on 10 July 1956 in

Niagara Falls, Ontario Niagara Falls is a city in Ontario, Canada. It is on the western bank of the Niagara River in the Golden Horseshoe region of Southern Ontario, with a population of 88,071 at the 2016 census. It is part of the St. Catharines - Niagara Census M ...

, Canada. He received his B. Math. in statistics and computer science from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

in 1979 and a Master's degree in Statistics from

in 1980. Tibshirani joined the doctoral program at

in 1981 and received his Ph.D. in 1984 under the supervision of

Bradley Efron Bradley Efron (; born May 24, 1938) is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association (2004) and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1987–1988).Cochran, J. (1 September 2015), "ASA Lead ...

. His dissertation was entitled "Local likelihood estimation".

Honors and awards

Tibshirani received the

COPSS Presidents' Award The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. The COPSS Presidents' Award is generally ...

in 1996. Given jointly by the world's leading statistical societies, the award recognizes outstanding contributions to statistics by a statistician under the age of 40. He is a fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

and the

American Statistical Association The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second oldest continuousl ...

. He won an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

in 1997. He was elected a Fellow of the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

in 2001 and a member of the

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 ...

in 2012. Tibshirani was made the 2012

Statistical Society of Canada The Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) (french: Société statistique du Canada) is a professional organization whose mission is to promote the use and development of statistics and probability. Its objectives are * to make the general public aw ...

's Gold Medalist at their yearly meeting in Guelph, Ontario for "exceptional contributions to methodology and theory for the analysis of complex data sets, smoothing and regression methodology, statistical learning, and classification, and application areas that include public health, genomics, and proteomics". He gave his Gold Medal Address at the 2013 meeting in Edmonton. He was elected to the Royal Society in 2019. Tibshirani was named as the 2021 recipient of the ISI Founders of Statistics Prize for his 1996 paper Regression Shrinkage and Selection via the Lasso.

Personal life

His son, Ryan Tibshirani, with whom he occasionally publishes scientific papers, is a professor at

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

in the Department of Statistics.

Publications

Tibshirani is a prolific author of scientific works on various topics in applied statistics, including statistical learning, data mining, statistical computing, and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

. He along with his collaborators has authored about 250 scientific articles. Many of Tibshirani's scientific articles were coauthored by his longtime collaborator,

Trevor Hastie Trevor John Hastie (born 27 June 1953) is an American statistician and computer scientist. He is currently serving as the John A. Overdeck Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Hastie is known for ...

. Tibshirani is one of the most ISI Highly Cited Authors in Mathematics by the ISI Web of Knowledge. He has coauthored the following books: * T. Hastie and R. Tibshirani, ''Generalized Additive Models'', Chapman and Hall, 1990. * B. Efron and R. Tibshirani, ''An Introduction to the Bootstrap'', Chapman and Hall, 1993 * T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman, ''The Elements of Statistical Learning: Prediction, Inference and Data Mining'', Second Edition, Springer Verlag, 2009 (available for free from the co-author's website). * G. James, D. Witten, T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, ''An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R'', Springer Verlag, 2013 (available for free from the co-author's website). * T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, M. Wainwright, ''Statistical Learning with Sparsity: the Lasso and Generalizations'', CRC Press, 2015 (available for free from the co-author's website).

References

External links