Statistical Theory and the Computer

Everyone here knows that the modern computer has profoundly changed statistical practice. The effect upon statistical theory is less obvious. Typical data analyses still rely, in the main, upon ideas developed fifty years ago. Inevitably though, new technical capabilities inspire new ideas. Efron, 1979B, describes a variety of current theoretical topics which depend upon the existence of cheap and fast computation: the jackknife, the bootstrap, cross-validation, robust estimation, the EM algorithm, and Cox’s likelihood function for censored data.