David W. Scott

Noah Harding Professor of Statistics

Working with researchers at Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, and elsewhere, Professor Scott has published numerous practical applications in fields of heart disease, remote sensing, signal processing, clustering, discrimination, and time series. With other members of the department, Professor Scott has worked with the former Texas Air Control Board on ozone forecasting, and currently collaborates with Rice Environmental Engineers on massive data understanding and visualization.

In the field of nonparametric density estimation, Professor Scott has provided fundamental understanding of many estimators including the histogram, frequency polygon, averaged shifted histogram, discrete penalized-likelihood estimator, adaptive estimators, oversmoothed estimators, and modal and robust regression estimators. In the area of smoothing parameter selection, he has provided basic algorithms including biased cross-validation and multivariate cross-validation. Exciting problems in very high-dimensional data and specialized topics remain open for investigation.

Professor Scott is Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the International Statistics Institute. He received the ASA Don Owen Award in 1993. He is the author of the textbook "Multivariate Density Estimation: Theory, Practice, and Visualization (John Wiley & Sons, 1992). He is a member of the NRC's Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. He is currently editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. He is past editor (Wolfgang Haerdle, co-editor) of Computational Statistics, which is published by Physica-Verlag, and recently on the editorial board of Statistical Sciences. He has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association and the Annals of Statistics. He is currently listed in Who's Who in America. He has held several offices in the Statistical Graphics Section of the American Statistical Association, including Program Chair, Chair-Elect, Chair, and currently Past-Chair.