A Conversation with Jerry Friedman

TL;DR

This paper features an interview with Jerry Friedman, highlighting his influential career in statistics and data mining, his key contributions like CART, and his impact on modern machine learning methods.

Contribution

The paper provides an in-depth conversation revealing Friedman's pioneering work in classification, regression trees, and statistical learning, emphasizing his influence on data mining and machine learning.

Findings

Friedman's work on CART revolutionized decision tree methods.

His contributions significantly impacted statistical learning and data mining.

Many of his algorithms are now standard in modern software packages.

Abstract

Jerome H. Friedman was born in Yreka, California, USA, on December 29, 1939. He received his high school education at Yreka High School, then spent two years at Chico State College before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley in 1959. He completed an undergraduate degree in physics in 1962 and a Ph.D. in high-energy particle physics in 1968 and was a post-doctoral research physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory during 1968-1972. In 1972, he moved to Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) as head of the Computation Research Group, retaining this position until 2006. In 1981, he was appointed half time as Professor in the Department of Statistics, Stanford University, remaining half time with his SLAC appointment. He has held visiting appointments at CSIRO in Sydney, CERN and the Department of Statistics at Berkeley, and has had a very active career as a commercial consultant. Jerry became Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics in 2007. Apart from some 30 publications in high-energy physics early in his career, Jerry has published over 70 research articles and books in statistics and computer science, including co-authoring the pioneering books Classification and Regression Trees and The Elements of Statistical Learning. Many of his publications have hundreds if not thousands of citations (e.g., the CART book has over 21,000). Much of his software is incorporated in commercial products, including at least one popular search engine. Many of his methods and algorithms are essential inclusions in modern statistical and data mining packages. Honors include the following: the Rietz Lecture (1999) and the Wald Lectures (2009); election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005) and the US National Academy of Sciences (2010); a Fellow of the American Statistical Association; Paper of the Year (JASA 1980, 1985; Technometrics 1998, 1992); Statistician of the Year (ASA, Chicago Chapter, 1999); ACM Data Mining Lifetime Innovation Award (2002), Emanuel & Carol Parzen Award for Statistical Innovation (2004); Noether Senior Lecturer (American Statistical Association, 2010); and the IEEE Computer Society Data Mining Research Contribution Award (2012).