Abbreviation | ASA |
---|---|
Formation | 1839 |
Headquarters | Alexandria, Virginia |
President | Ji-Hyun Lee (2025) |
Website | www |
The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts on November 27, 1839, and is the second-oldest continuously operating professional society in the U.S. behind the Massachusetts Medical Society (founded in 1781). ASA services statisticians, quantitative scientists, and users of statistics across many academic areas and applications. The association publishes a variety of journals and sponsors several international conferences every year.
The organization's mission is to promote good application of statistical science, specifically to: [1]
As of 2022, the ASA membership exceeds 19,000 professionals found in government, academia, and the private sector. [2]
Organizational members and corporate supporters of the ASA include AstraZeneca, Merck & Co., the National Security Agency, Pfizer, RTI International, StataCorp and Westat. [3]
In November 2018, ASA Board of Directors approved a code of conduct statement on Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI). It was reviewed and updated by ASA BOD in 2019, 2021, and most recently in 2023. [4]
In June 2020, the R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship was changed to COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship. The change follows discussions about Fisher's views on race and eugenics. [5]
In 2021, ASA established the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Outreach Group, known as the JEDI Outreach Group. [6] [7]
New Fellowships of the ASA are granted annually by the ASA Committee on Fellows. Candidates must have been members for the preceding three years but may be nominated by anyone. The maximum number of recipients each year is one-third of one percent of the ASA membership. [8]
ASA is organized in Sections, Chapters and Committees. Chapters are arranged geographically, representing 78 areas across the US and Canada. An example of an early and large chapter is the SoCalASA. Sections are subject-area and industry-area interest groups covering 22 sub-disciplines. ASA has more than 60 committees coordinating meetings, publications, education, careers, and special-interest topics involving statisticians.
ASA is a member society of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. [9]
As of April 2010 [update] , the ASA offers the Accredited Professional Statistician status (PStat), to members who meet the ASA's credentialing requirements, which include an advanced degree in statistics or related quantitative field, five years of documented experience, and evidence of professional competence. [10] To apply for continuing accreditation, PStat members are expected to complete 60 hours of professional development activities each year. [11]
The ASA also offers the Graduate Statistician status (GStat) as of April 2014. [12] It serves as a preparatory accreditation suitable for graduate students.
A list of PStat and GStat accredited members is available on the ASA website. [13]
The ASA publishes several scientific journals:
Online-only journals:
Co-Published journals:
The ASA co-sponsors the Current Index to Statistics (CIS)
The monthly magazine for members Amstat News is available online [14] and features first-person statistician stories called My ASA Story. Based on the monthly column in AmStat News, the ASA produces a website called STATtr@k with new articles every month for early career statisticians and data analysts, recent graduates, or those who are in a statistics program. [15] Quarterly magazine Chance and bimonthly magazine Significance are geared toward a general audience.
Historical publications include:
Meetings provide a platform for scholars and practitioners to exchange research, job opportunities and ideas with each other. ASA holds an annual meeting called Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM), [19] a conference on statistical methodologies and applications called Spring Research Conference (SRC), [20] Conference on Statistical Practice (CSP), [21] and sponsors multiple international meetings and special-interest group meetings.
Stephen Elliott Fienberg was a professor emeritus in the Department of Statistics, the Machine Learning Department, Heinz College, and Cylab at Carnegie Mellon University. Fienberg was the founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application and of the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality.
The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts of the world. Beginning in 2005, the institute started offering joint membership with the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability as well as with the International Statistical Institute. The Institute was founded in 1935 with Harry C. Carver and Henry L. Rietz as its two most important supporters. The institute publishes a variety of journals, and holds several international conference every year.
The COPSS Presidents' Award is given annually by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies to a young statistician in recognition of outstanding contributions to the profession of statistics. The COPSS Presidents' Award is generally regarded as one of the highest honours in the field of statistics, along with the International Prize in Statistics.
The COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship is a very high recognition of achievement and scholarship in statistical science that recognizes the highly significant impact of statistical methods on scientific investigations. The award was funded in 1963 by the North American Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) "to honor both the contributions of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher and the work of a present–day statistician for their advancement of statistical theory and applications." The COPSS Starting in 1964, the Distinguished Lecture is given at the Joint Statistical Meetings in North America and is subsequently published in a statistics journal. The lecturer receives a plaque and a cash award of US$2,000. It is given every year if a nominee considered eligible and worthy is found, which one was in all but five years up to 1984, and in all years since. In June 2020, the name of the award was changed to its current name after discussions concerning Fisher's controversial views on race and eugenics.
Chartered Statistician (CStat) is a professional qualification in Statistics awarded to practising professional statisticians by the Royal Statistical Society in the United Kingdom. A Chartered Statistician may use the post-nominal letters CStat.
Chien-Fu Jeff Wu is a Taiwanese-American statistician. He is the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on the convergence of the EM algorithm, resampling methods such as the bootstrap and jackknife, and industrial statistics, including design of experiments, and robust parameter design.
Significance, established in 2004, is a bimonthly print and digital magazine published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Statistical Society of Australia (SSA) and the American Statistical Association (ASA). It publishes articles on topics of statistical interest presented at a level suited for a general audience. Articles are reviewed by an editorial board of statistics experts drawn from the three societies. The founding editor-in-chief was Helen Joyce. The current editor is Anna Britten. Significance replaced the RSS's journal, The Statistician. The magazine also has a website.
Jianqing Fan is a statistician, financial econometrician, and data scientist. He is currently the Frederick L. Moore '18 Professor of Finance, Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Professor of Statistics and Machine Learning, and a former chairman of Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (2012–2015) and a former director of Committee of Statistical Studies (2005–2017) at Princeton University, where he directs both statistics lab and financial econometrics lab since 2008.
Xiao-Li Meng is a Chinese American statistician and the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Statistics at Harvard University. He received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2001. He has written numerous research papers about Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms and other statistical methodology.
Jun S. Liu is a Chinese-American statistician focusing on Bayesian statistical inference, statistical machine learning, and computational biology. He was assistant professor of statistics at Harvard University from 1991 to 1994. From 1994 to 2004, he was Assistant, Associate, and full Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. Since 2000, Liu has been Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University and held a courtesy appointment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Michael Abbott Newton is a Canadian statistician. He is a Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and he received the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2004. He has written many research papers about the statistical analysis of cancer biology, including linkage analysis and signal identification.
Larry Alan Wasserman is a Canadian-American statistician and a professor in the Department of Statistics & Data Science and the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.
Xihong Lin is a Chinese–American statistician known for her contributions to mixed models, nonparametric and semiparametric regression, and statistical genetics and genomics. As of 2015, she is the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Coordinating Director of the Program in Quantitative Genomics.
Bin Yu is a Chinese-American statistician. She is currently Chancellor's Professor in the Departments of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
Raymond James Carroll is an American statistician, and Distinguished Professor of statistics, nutrition and toxicology at Texas A&M University. He is a recipient of 1988 COPSS Presidents' Award and 2002 R. A. Fisher Lectureship. He has made fundamental contributions to measurement error model, nonparametric and semiparametric modeling.
The Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) comprises the presidents, past presidents and presidents-elect of the following, primarily Northern American, professional societies of statisticians:
Sallie Ann Keller is a statistician and a former president of the American Statistical Association (2006).
Jana Lynn Asher is a statistician known for her work on human rights and sexual violence. She is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Slippery Rock University. She was a co-editor of the book Statistical Methods for Human Rights with David L. Banks and Fritz Scheuren.
Katherine Jenny Thompson is a statistician in the United States Census Bureau, where she is Methodology Director of Complex Survey Methods and Analysis Group in the Economic Statistical Methods Division.
Kary Lynn Myers is an American statistician whose research has included work on scientific data analysis and radiation monitoring. She is a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she has been the deputy leader of the Statistical Sciences group. She is also known as the founder and organizer of the biennial Conference on Data Analysis (CoDA), for data-driven research within the United States Department of Energy.