About the Book
This volume includes 21 journal articles by renowned statistician Bradley Efron. Each article is introduced by a well-known statistician. The volume also includes a very useful index, Professor Efron's bibliography, and comments by former students.
Table of Contents:
Foreword by Bradley Efron.-1. From 1965: The convex hull of a random set of points, Introduced by Tom Cover.- 2. From 1971: Forcing a sequential experiment to be balanced, Introduced by Herman Chernoff.-3. From 1975: Defining the curvature of a statistical problem (with applications to second order efficiency) Introduced by Rob Kass and Paul Vos.- 4. From 1975: Data analysis using Stein’s estimator and its generalizations (with Carl Morris), Introduced by John Rolph.- 5. From 1976: Estimating the number of unseen species: How many words did Shakespeare know? (with Ronald Thisted), Introduced by Peter McCullagh.- 6. From 1977: The efficiency of Cox’s likelihood function for censored data, Introduced by John Kalbfleisch.- 7. From 1977: Stein’s paradox in statistics (with Carl Morris), Introduced by Jim Berger.- 8. From 1978: Assessing the accuracy of the maximum likelihood estimator: Observed versus expected Fisher information (with David V. Hinkley), Introduced by Thomas DiCiccio.- 9. From 1979: Bootstrap methods: Another look at the jackknife, Introduced by David Hinkley .- 10. From 1981: The jackknife estimate of variance (with Charles Stein), Introduced by Jun Shao and C.F. Jeff Wu.- 11. From 1982: The Jackknife, the Bootstrap and Other Resampling Plans [excerpt], Introduced by Peter Hall .- 12. From 1983: Estimating the error rate of a prediction rule: Improvement on cross-validation, Introduced by Trevor Hastie.- 13. From 1986: Why isn’t everyone a Bayesian?, Introduced by Larry Wasserman.- 14. From 1987: Better bootstrap confidence intervals,Introduced by Peter Bickel.- 15. From 1993: An Introduction to the Bootstrap (with Robert Tibshirani) [excerpt], Introduced by Rudy Beran.- 16. From 1996: Using specially designed exponential families for density estimation (with Robert Tibshirani), Introduced by Nancy Reid.- 17. From 1996: Bootstrap confidence levels for phylogenetic trees (correction) (with Elizabeth Halloran and Susan Holmes), Introduced byJoe Felsenstein.- 18. From 1998: R. A. Fisher in the 21st century, Introduced by Stephen Stigler.- 19. From 2001: Empirical Bayes analysis of a microarray experiment (with Robert Tibshirani, John D. Storey and Virginia Tusher), Introduced by Rafael Irizarry .- 20. From 2004: Least angle regression (with Trevor Hastie, Iain Johnstone and Robert Tibshirani), Introduced by David Madigan.- 21. From 2004: Large-scale simultaneous hypothesis testing: The choice of a null hypothesis, Introduced by Michael Newton.- President’s Corner by Bradley Efron (AMSTAT News, April 2004): “But What Do Statisticians Do?”.
Review :
From the reviews:
"This Volume is a fine collection of 21 selected papers by Efron. One of the book’s most interesting and important features is the formal introduction of each paper by a distinguished professional in the field.… The editors did a wonderful job in selecting them.… This volume contains a wealth of knowledge and important information for all of us!… In a nutshell the book is a must buy. I very much enjoyed reading this special edition, and I am sure you will too! It will be hard to find this much influential work in one place. This book is worth more than $149 U.S.!" (S. Ejaz Ahmed, Technometics, February 2009, Vol. 51, NO. 1)
“The volume at hand, the first in Springer’s new ‘Selected Works’ series, attempts to give a panoramic view of the work of an untiring statistics researcher, a living legend among our ranks. It is edited by Carl Morris of Harvard University and Robert Tibshirani of Stanford University, both long-time coauthors of Efron and among his closest collaborators. The editors chose 21 prominent works to include in this volume; in his Foreword, Efron calls these his ‘best work so far’ (!). …However, what makes this volume a treat is the array of 21 distinguished researchers that have enlisted themselves to introduce—and put in perspective—each of these works. The list reads like a Who’s Who in statistics, and includes: T. Cover, H. Chernoff, R. Kass, P. Vos, J. Rolph, P. McCullagh, J. Kalbfleisch, J. Berger, T. DiCiccio, D. Hinkley, J. Shao, C.F.J. Wu, P. Hall, T. Hastie, L. Wasserman, P. Bickel, R. Beran, N. Reid, J. Felsenstein, S. Stigler, R. Irezarry, D. Madigan, and M. Newton. The insights that these experts bring to these works are profound; … Additional features of the volume include three to four pages of comments of former students of Efron’s, 10 pages of photographs spanning 40 years, a full list of Efron’s publications (up to 2008), and a reprint of Efron’s AMSTAT NewsPresident’s Corner article: ‘But what do statisticians do?’. Because of Efron’s recent 70th birthday, many people would call this volume a ‘Festschrift’; I would say it is simply a treat for us all.” (Journal of the American Statistical Association, June 2010, Vol. 105, No. 490)
“All interested in statistical research. … How did the statistician Efron arise? What other research did Efron conduct? … What does he think about statistics? If you are interested in partial answers to any of the above questions, this is a book for you. … Every paper is preceded by a commentary by an expert on the subject … and this doubles the value of the collection. … a treasure trove of statistical gems, and deserves a place on the shelf of every research statistician.” (Terry Speed, International Statistical Review, Vol. 78 (3), 2010)
