2017 DeGroot Prize awarded to “Adversarial Risk Analysis”
Adversarial Risk Analysis, authored by David L, Banks, Jesus M. Rios Aliaga, and David Rios Insua, is the recipient of the 2017 DeGroot Prize. This prize was awarded at the International Society for Bayesian Analysis(ISBA) conference June 24 – 29, 2018 in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. The DeGroot Prize is awarded to the author or authors of a published book in Statistical Science and is named for Morris H. (“Morrie”) DeGroot, and recognizes the impact and importance of his work in Statistics and Decision Theory. To find out about this award visit the ISBA Website.
Morrie DeGroot has had a strong influence on author David L. Banks, as he was responsible for hiring him at Carnegie Mellon back in 1987, and his example showed so many facets of an academic life lived well. David states, “Morrie had fun ideas that advanced the field, he was loved by his students and admired by his colleagues, and he had a warm humanity that everyone felt. I learned a lot from him about the kind of person I wanted to be, and I hope I have made some progress in that direction. Winning the DeGroot Prize has special significance for me.” Read more about David L. Banks, with his Q&A with CRC Press.
Adversarial Risk Analysis shows decision makers how to build Bayesian models for the strategic calculation of their opponents, enabling decision makers to maximize their expected utility or minimize their expected loss. This new approach to risk analysis asserts that analysts should use Bayesian thinking to describe their beliefs about an opponent’s goals, resources, optimism, and type of strategic calculation, such as minimax and level-k thinking. Within that framework, analysts then solve the problem from the perspective of the opponent while placing subjective probability distributions on all unknown quantities. This produces a distribution over the actions of the opponent and enables analysts to maximize their expected utilities.
View and purchase this book at the 2018 Joint Statistical Meetings, July 28 – August 2, 2018 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in CRC Press’s Booth #436.
Adversarial Risk Analysis is available via https://www.crcpress.com/9781498712392
To request a review copies please visit: http://pages.email.taylorandfrancis.com/review-copy-request
About the Author:
David Banks obtained a Ph.D. in Statistics in 1984 from Virginia Tech. He won an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Mathematical Sciences, which he took at Berkeley. In 1986 he was a visiting assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and then joined the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon in 1987. In 1997 he went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, then served as chief statistician of the U.S. Department of Transportation, and finally joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2002. In 2003, he returned to academics at Duke University. He is a professor in the Department of Statistical Science, and also the director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI).
He was the coordinating editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He co-founded the journal Statistics and Public Policy and served as its editor. He chaired the American Statistical Association’s section on National Defense and Homeland Security, the section on Risk Analysis, and the section on Statistical Learning and Data Science. He is past-president of the Classification Society, and has twice served on the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association. He was the president of the International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He recently won the American Statistical Association’s Founders Award. He has led research programs at SAMSI and at the Isaac Newton Institute.