Opinion
We in IMS must build the foundations of this emerging field Data science is at a crossroads. Will it become a fundamentally applied discipline, a collection of heuristics without any coherent mathematical underpinning? Or will a rigorous foundation lead to practical new tools and algorithms with provable properties? IMS members…

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Jan Swart is a research fellow at the Institute of Information Theory and Automatization, in the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. He writes to share his experiences of co-organizing Learning Sessions, trialling a new format for sharing knowledge:   In four columns published in 2014 and 2015…

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Bin Yu, Departments of Statistics and EECS, University of California at Berkeley wrote this Invited note for http://odbms.org (The Resource Portal for Big Data, New Data Management Technologies and Data Science). We reprint it here with permission: In the era of big data, much of the research in academia and…

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Jeffrey S. Rosenthal, Professor of Statistics, University of Toronto, writes: It happens to the instructor of every university-level introductory statistics class. You define the mean m, and the variance v. You explain how to estimate the mean from an i.i.d. sample, via $\bar{x} = \frac{1}{n} \sum{x_i}$. Then you have to…

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David Dunson, Arts and Sciences Professor of Statistical Science at Duke University, writes: What is the core of data science? To address this, I think it is necessary to first touch on the question of what is data science? Certainly there is not one agreed upon definition of what data…

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