The classic frequentist theory of hypothesis testing developed by Neyman, Pearson and Fisher has a claim to being the twentieth century’s most influential piece of applied mathematics. Something new is happening in the twenty-first century: high-throughput devices, such as microarrays, routinely require simultaneous hypothesis tests for thousands of individual cases, not at all what the classical theory had in mind. In these situations empirical Bayes information begins to force itself upon frequentists and Bayesians alike. The two-groups model is a simple Bayesian construction that facilitates empirical Bayes analysis. This article concerns the interplay of Bayesian and frequentist ideas in the two-groups setting, with particular attention focused on Benjamini and Hochberg’s False Discovery Rate method. Topics include the choice and meaning of the null hypothesis in large-scale testing situations, power considerations, the limitations of permutation methods, significance testing for groups of cases (such as pathways in microarray studies), correlation effects, multiple confidence intervals and Bayesian competitors to the two-groups model.

Brad Efron’s paper has inspired a return to the ideas behind Bayes, frequency and empirical Bayes. The latter preferably would not be limited to exchangeable models for the data and hyperparameters. Parallels are revealed between microarray analyses and profiling of hospitals, with advances suggesting more decision modeling for gene identification also. Then good multilevel and empirical Bayes models for random effects should be sought when regression toward the mean is anticipated.

Jerzy Neyman’s life history and some of his contributions to applied statistics are reviewed. In a 1960 article he wrote: “Currently in the period of dynamic indeterminism in science, there is hardly a serious piece of research which, if treated realistically, does not involve operations on stochastic processes. The time has arrived for the theory of stochastic processes to become an item of usual equipment of every applied statistician.” The emphasis in this article is on stochastic processes and on stochastic process data analysis. A number of data sets and corresponding substantive questions are addressed. The data sets concern sardine depletion, blowfly dynamics, weather modification, elk movement and seal journeying. Three of the examples are from Neyman’s work and four from the author’s joint work with collaborators.

Verbal autopsy procedures are widely used for estimating cause-specific mortality in areas without medical death certification. Data on symptoms reported by caregivers along with the cause of death are collected from a medical facility, and the cause-of-death distribution is estimated in the population where only symptom data are available. Current approaches analyze only one cause at a time, involve assumptions judged difficult or impossible to satisfy, and require expensive, time-consuming, or unreliable physician reviews, expert algorithms, or parametric statistical models. By generalizing current approaches to analyze multiple causes, we show how most of the difficult assumptions underlying existing methods can be dropped. These generalizations also make physician review, expert algorithms and parametric statistical assumptions unnecessary. With theoretical results, and empirical analyses in data from China and Tanzania, we illustrate the accuracy of this approach. While no method of analyzing verbal autopsy data, including the more computationally intensive approach offered here, can give accurate estimates in all circumstances, the procedure offered is conceptually simpler, less expensive, more general, as or more replicable, and easier to use in practice than existing approaches. We also show how our focus on estimating aggregate proportions, which are the quantities of primary interest in verbal autopsy studies, may also greatly reduce the assumptions necessary for, and thus improve the performance of, many individual classifiers in this and other areas. As a companion to this paper, we also offer easy-to-use software that implements the methods discussed herein.

When applying a statistical method in practice it often occurs that some observations deviate from the usual assumptions. However, many classical methods are sensitive to outliers. The goal of robust statistics is to develop methods that are robust against the possibility that one or several unannounced outliers may occur anywhere in the data. These methods then allow to detect outlying observations by their residuals from a robust fit. We focus on high-breakdown methods, which can deal with a substantial fraction of outliers in the data. We give an overview of recent high-breakdown robust methods for multivariate settings such as covariance estimation, multiple and multivariate regression, discriminant analysis, principal components and multivariate calibration.

Peter J. Huber was born on March 25, 1934, in Wohlen, a small town in the Swiss countryside. He obtained a diploma in mathematics in 1958 and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1961, both from ETH Zurich. His thesis was in pure mathematics, but he then decided to go into statistics. He spent 1961–1963 as a postdoc at the statistics department in Berkeley where he wrote his first and most famous paper on robust statistics, “Robust Estimation of a Location Parameter.” After a position as a visiting professor at Cornell University, he became a full professor at ETH Zurich. He worked at ETH until 1978, interspersed by visiting positions at Cornell, Yale, Princeton and Harvard. After leaving ETH, he held professor positions at Harvard University 1978–1988, at MIT 1988–1992, and finally at the University of Bayreuth from 1992 until his retirement in 1999. He now lives in Klosters, a village in the Grisons in the Swiss Alps.

Peter Huber has published four books and over 70 papers on statistics and data analysis. In addition, he has written more than a dozen papers and two books on Babylonian mathematics, astronomy and history. In 1972, he delivered the Wald lectures. He is a fellow of the IMS, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1988 he received a Humboldt Award and in 1994 an honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel. In addition to his fundamental results in robust statistics, Peter Huber made important contributions to computational statistics, strategies in data analysis, and applications of statistics in fields such as crystallography, EEGs, and human growth curves.

Howard Raiffa earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, his master’s degree in statistics and his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan. Since 1957, Raiffa has been a member of the faculty at Harvard University, where he is now the Frank P. Ramsey Chair in Managerial Economics (Emeritus) in the Graduate School of Business Administration and the Kennedy School of Government. A pioneer in the creation of the field known as decision analysis, his research interests span statistical decision theory, game theory, behavioral decision theory, risk analysis and negotiation analysis. Raiffa has supervised more than 90 doctoral dissertations and written 11 books. His new book is Negotiation Analysis: The Science and Art of Collaborative Decision Making. Another book, Smart Choices, co-authored with his former doctoral students John Hammond and Ralph Keeney, was the CPR (formerly known as the Center for Public Resources) Institute for Dispute Resolution Book of the Year in 1998. Raiffa helped to create the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and he later became its first Director, serving in that capacity from 1972 to 1975. His many honors and awards include the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Society of Risk Analysis; the Frank P. Ramsey Medal for outstanding contributions to the field of decision analysis from the Operations Research Society of America; and the Melamed Prize from the University of Chicago Business School for The Art and Science of Negotiation. He earned a Gold Medal from the International Association for Conflict Management and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution. He holds honorary doctor’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Ben Gurion University of the Negev and Harvard University. The latter was awarded in 2002.