Pranab K. Sen

Pranab Kumar Sen (born November 7, 1937 in Calcutta, India)[1] is a statistician, a professor of statistics and the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[2]

Contents

Academic biography

Sen was the second of seven siblings; his father, a railway officer, died of leukemia when Sen was ten, and he was raised by his mother, the daughter of a physician.[3] He began his undergraduate studies at Presidency College, Kolkata, initially intending to study medicine but shifting to statistics when it was discovered that he was too young for medical college.[3] He received a B.S. from the University of Calcutta in 1955, an M.Sc. in 1957, and a Ph.D. in 1962;[1][2][4] his doctoral advisor was Hari Kinkar Nandi.[3] He taught for three years at the University of Calcutta and one more year at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the UNC faculty in 1965; although he has held visiting positions at other universities, he has remained at Chapel Hill for the rest of his career.[1][2] He was the founding co-editor of two journals, Sequential Analysis and Statistics and Decisions,[3] and was joint editor-in-chief of the Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference from 1980 to 1983.[1]

Research and graduate advising

Sen is the author or co-author of multiple books on non-parametric statistics, the advisor of over 80 Ph.D. students, and the author of over 600 research publications.[1][5] He is known for inventing the Hodges–Lehmann estimator independently of and contemporaneously with Hodges and Lehmann[3][6] and for the Theil–Sen estimator, a form of robust regression that fits a line to two-dimensional sample points by choosing the slope of the fit line to be the median of the slopes of the lines through pairs of samples.[7][8]

Awards and honors

Sen is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics[9] and of the American Statistical Association.[10] He became the Cary C. Boshamer Professor in 1982.[1] He was the Lukacs Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bowling Green State University in 1996–1997.[11] In 2002 he won the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award of the American Statistical Association,[12] and he was the 2010 winner of the Wilks Memorial Award of the ASA "for outstanding contributions to statistical research, especially in nonparametric statistics and biostatistics; and for exceptional service in mentoring doctoral students."[13]

In 2007, a festschrift was dedicated to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday.[3][5]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2011-07-03.
  2. ^ a b c Faculty profile, UNC Chapel Hill, retrieved 2011-07-03.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Ghosh, Malay; Schell, Michael J. (2008), "A Conversation with Pranab Kumar Sen", Statistical Science 23 (4): 548–564, arXiv:0906.4165, doi:10.1214/08-STS255 .
  4. ^ Pranab Kumar Sen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project..
  5. ^ a b Balakrishnan, N.; Pena, E.; Silvapulle, M. J. (2008), "Pranab Kumar Sen: Life and Works", Beyond Parametrics in Interdisciplinary Research: Festschrift in Honor of Professor Pranab K. Sen, IMS, pp. 1–16, arXiv:0805.2229, doi:10.1214/193940307000000013 .
  6. ^ Lehmann, Erich L. (2006). Nonparametrics: Statistical methods based on ranks (Reprinting of 1988 revision of 1975 Holden-Day ed.). New York: Springer. pp. 176 and 200–201. ISBN 978-0-387-35212-1, 0-387-35212-0. MR395032. 
  7. ^ Rousseeuw, Peter J.; Leroy, Annick M. (2003), Robust Regression and Outlier Detection, Wiley Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics, 516, Wiley, p. 67, ISBN 9780471488552, http://books.google.com/books?id=lK9gHXwYnqgC&pg=PA67 .
  8. ^ Wilcox, Rand R. (2001), "Theil–Sen estimator", Fundamentals of Modern Statistical Methods: Substantially Improving Power and Accuracy, Springer-Verlag, pp. 207–210, ISBN 9780387951577, http://books.google.com/books?id=YSFb4QX2UIoC&pg=PA207 .
  9. ^ IMS Fellows, retrieved 2011-07-03.
  10. ^ ASA Fellows, retrieved 2011-07-03.
  11. ^ Bowling Green State University: Eugene Lukacs Professors, retrieved 2011-07-03.
  12. ^ Gottfried E. Noether Awards, retrieved 2011-07-03.
  13. ^ Samuel S. Wilks Award, retrieved 2011-07-03.