A Conversation with Richard A. Olshen

TL;DR

This interview with Richard A. Olshen explores his extensive career in statistics, focusing on his work with tree-structured algorithms for classification and regression, and their applications in medicine and biology.

Contribution

The paper highlights Olshen's development of CART algorithms and their impact on medical diagnosis and genetic research, emphasizing practical applications.

Findings

Development of CART algorithms for classification and survival analysis

Application of tree methods in medical diagnosis and prognosis

Insights into genetic factors influencing hypertension

Abstract

Richard Olshen was born in Portland, Oregon, on May 17, 1942. Richard spent his early years in Chevy Chase, Maryland, but has lived most of his life in California. He received an A.B. in Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963, and a Ph.D. in Statistics from Yale University in 1966, writing his dissertation under the direction of Jimmie Savage and Frank Anscombe. He served as Research Staff Statistician and Lecturer at Yale in 1966-1967. Richard accepted a faculty appointment at Stanford University in 1967, and has held tenured faculty positions at the University of Michigan (1972-1975), the University of California, San Diego (1975-1989), and Stanford University (since 1989). At Stanford, he is Professor of Health Research and Policy (Biostatistics), Chief of the Division of Biostatistics (since 1998) and Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering and of Statistics. At various times, he has had visiting faculty positions at Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and the Hebrew University. Richard's research interests are in statistics and mathematics and their applications to medicine and biology. Much of his work has concerned binary tree-structured algorithms for classification, regression, survival analysis and clustering. Those for classification and survival analysis have been used with success in computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis, especially in cardiology, oncology and toxicology. He coauthored the 1984 book Classification and Regression Trees (with Leo Brieman, Jerome Friedman and Charles Stone) which gives motivation, algorithms, various examples and mathematical theory for what have come to be known as CART algorithms. The approaches to tree-structured clustering have been applied to problems in digital radiography (with Stanford EE Professor Robert Gray) and to HIV genetics, the latter work including studies on single nucleotide polymorphisms, which has helped to shed light on the presence of hypertension in certain subpopulations of women.