Statistics for the Rest of Us

R.I.P. George E. P. Box, 1919–2013

Thursday, March 28, 2013, was not a good day for the field of quality. On that day we quality practitioners lost the great statistician George E. P. Box, who died at age 93.

I’m not a statistician; however, as a quality professional, I am somebody who needs to use statistics for practical, real-world uses. I believe it is people like me who benefit the most from Box’s many contributions to the field of quality. Box was very involved with educating people in practical statistics. In “An Accidental Statistician” he wrote that he realized that “students were learning a great deal about statistical theory but very little on how to use it,” so he invited students and faculty into his home to discuss statistics. For those of us who never had a chance to meet him in person, there are many of his publications available.

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Comments

Stat-Us-tics

I'm no Statistics fan: if there's still some freedom in this world, one could choose the music he wants to listen to. And I don't like many Statisticians' music, just as I don't like Rap music. Statistics started as a prediction-based tool but it was made to grow to a self-feeding beast, that's now - I sincerely hope - decaying to a saurus. I've seen too many tons of charts been idiotically filled by line operators, and left to rot in the quality manager's office: yes, "Statistics for the Rest of Us". The Ultimate Rest. Thank you.

Thank you, Matthew

Thank you, Matthew, for that tribute. George Box was certainly one of the most original thinkers in statistics. One of his more revolutionary observations was that "the domination of Statistics by Mathematics rather than by science has greatly reduced the value and the status of the subject." This quote, from the abstract of "Scientific Statistics, Teaching, Learning and the Computer," discussed the value of statistics in an iterative learning paradigm, very different from the theorem-proof paradigm of mathematics. He noted: "An important issue of the 1930's was whether statistics was to be treated as a branch of Science or of Mathematics. To my mind unfortunately, the latter view has been adopted in the United States and in many other countries. Statistics has for some time been categorized as one of the Mathematical Sciences and this view has dominated university teaching, promotion, tenure of faculty, the distribution of grants by funding agencies and the characteristics of statistical journals. All this has, I believe, greatly limited the value and distorted the development of our subject."

There are too few influential statisticians who think that way. The loss of one of the most influential thought leaders in our subject will be keenly felt. This paper, and the first chapter of Statistic for Experimenters, should be required reading at the beginning of every statistics course.

References:

Box, G.E.P. (June, 1996). Scientific statistics, teaching, learning and the computer. CQPI Report 146, 1-7.

Box, G.E.P., Hunter, J. S., & Hunter, W. G., (2005). Statistics for experimenters. (2nd Ed.) Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Interscience.