Twenty-Third Pfizer Colloquium 2012: Abstract

A Pedestrian’s Lost Horizon in the Wiener Wald of Statistical Science

 Dr. Pranab Kumar Sen

Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Biostatistics

Department of Biostatistics, Gillings School of Public Health, McGavran-Greenberg Hall

&

Professor, Department of Statistics and Operations Research

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

http://www.sph.unc.edu/images/stories/cv_storage/704289903_cv.pdf

Abstract 

          With my tender-foot in statistics, I have a pedestrian detour in its Wiener Wald on to the lost horizon of modern statistical science. This pilgrimage to the Statistics Shangri La has witnessed some global teaching and research perspectives along with the ASA/IMS differentials and the evolution of Biometry to Biostatistics to Bioinformatics. In the consolidation of modern Statistical Science with all its tributaries, has there been a coup to move out of the mathematical science domain into the Wiener Wald of informatics and data mining? How far the Statistics Shangri La, a diversified utopian unfathomed discipline, can accommodate inter-faith (non-homogeneous) group meditation (collaboration) in its traditional vagrancy of self-realization (accomplishment) and prevent professional cultism? Are we to succumb to the omics of computational fantastics? As opposed to the statistical predictivity, of course, whatever will be will be, the future is not for us to see!