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Abstract:
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Several common beliefs about statistics in government diametrically oppose the reality for science agencies. Science at the frontiers---in a federal agency, research institute, academia, or industry---is high-tech, computationally intensive work by teams with deep scientific knowledge and equally deep reservoirs of intelligence. The statistical challenges now arise from complexity of the science, high-dimensionality of data, massiveness of databases, and intricacies of interrelationships among variables and observations. Successful science depends on integration of statistical thinking into the research; successful statistics is driven by the science to achieve accurate statistical formulation of concepts at the core of the research and apply analytic tools that penetrate the complexity of the data. Examples illustrate the statistician's role as an interdisciplinary research team member.
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