American Statistical Association New York City Metropolitan Area Chapter Mailman School of Public Health Columbia University Department of Biostatistics Colloquium

Statistics is the mathematical theory of learning from experience, especially experience that arrives a little bit at a time: a baseball player's success or failure in one trip to the plate, a cancer patient's survival or death in a clinical trial of a new treatment. Two competing schools, the Bayesians and the frequentists, have contended for supremacy in information collection for two and a half centuries. Suddenly, at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, new scientific technology, producing torrents of data asking volumes of questions, has forced a combined Bayesian/frequentist approach to information analysis. I'll describe both the old and new theories through a few examples. No background beyond elementary probability will be assumed.