PROSPECTIVE GRADUATE STUDENTS |
Overview: The Discipline of Statistics
Statistics is the science
of collecting and analyzing data, and drawing inferences from data. It
has been used in virtually every field of human endeavor, including engineering
and medicine, as well as the biological, physical, social and decision
sciences. Modern Statistics has close links
with computer science and mathematics.
The four key words to the Statistics programs at Case Western Reserve
University are: theory, applications, computing, and substantive fields.
Each of the degree programs can be characterized as it addresses these
four aspects.
A hallmark of the Case Western Reserve Statistics program is the stress
placed on strong cores to underpin the fundamental concepts of statistics,
with courses in a variety of methodologies, computing, and modern data
analysis with serious connection to a substantive area for application
of statistics and practice in scientific collaboration, and with forums
for the development of articulate oral (and written) presentation.
Modern Statistics
Modern Statistics has emerged from the probabilistic reasoning of the
nineteenth century, from the design and analysis of agricultural experiments
in the early twentieth century that gave acceptance to this NEW field
of study and from the coherent organization of surveys to replace censuses
for many governmental purposes. Now the thrust of the discipline is toward
the problems of making efficient use of very large and very small experiments
and observational studies, toward drawing information from high-dimensional
observations interrelated in complex ways, and toward predicting events
for complex systems and quantifying the uncertainties inherent in these
projections. Modern statistical methodology, too, has emerged from its
roots in calculator computation and approximation to focus on computationally
intensive and/or high-dimensional problems in visualization, analysis,
and approximation. The statistical topics of design and analysis continue
to exist, but the problems are much harder, more likely to depend directly
on one or more substantive disciplines involved in a research investigation
and to demand greater precision in the final objective, whether estimation
or prediction.
Thus over the past half century, as with other disciplines, the mathematics
used in Statistics has become more sophisticated and more diverse; and
computing has become an essential part in almost every aspect of statistical
theory and practice. Also, the linking of a mathematical/statistical formulation
to the substantive field is now preeminent, for an inaccurate understanding
leading to a gross approximation in the statistical formulation is no
longer good enough to be satisfactory. But the need for inference in the
presence of uncertainty and some understanding of the magnitude of the
uncertainty in that inference remains at the core of the discipline. As
research has become more interdisciplinary, and as technology continues
to become more powerful but also more intricate, the ONE-VARIABLE-AT-A-TIME
approach used in experimentation has become patently untenable and the
BRUTE FORCE method of trying every combination of factors is clearly infeasible.
So the need for efficient inference and for assessment of its quality
is expanding.
The Statistics programs at Case Western Reserve University reflect these
changes in the discipline with strong cores to underpin the fundamental
concepts of statistics, with courses in a variety of methodologies, with
serious connection to a substantive area for application of statistics
and practice in scientific collaboration, and with forums for the development
of articulate oral (and written) presentation. |
