Statistical science in information technology and precision medicine

Broadly speaking, statistical science is the science that deals with the collection and analysis of data. Although its methodological developments are rooted in mathematical sciences, particularly probability and optimization, it has transcended mathematical sciences as a discipline by growing in multidisciplinary platforms. Examples in the United States and Canada are biostatistics and epidemiology, biomedical data science/informatics, statistics in information engineering/data science, financial engineering and statistics, statistics and actuarial science. In China, mathematics and statistics are first-class disciplines at Peking University and Nankai University, whereas statistics but not mathematics is listed as a first-class discipline at Renmin University, Xiamen University and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Herein we first give an overview of statistical science in online experimentation, web-based personalized marketing, recommender systems, and precision medicine and health. We then develop new statistical methods to address two challenging problems in online experimentation and precision medicine.

Keywords

A/B testing, adaptive subgroup selection, enrichment designs, family-wise error rate in multiple testing, group sequential methods, hybrid resampling, online experiments

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T.L. Lai is supported by NSF DMS-1811818.

Received 16 September 2019

Accepted 30 September 2019

Published 2 October 2019