Cohen earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics with honors from the University of California, San Diego.[1][2] He went on to complete his Ph.D. in mathematics with specialty in mathematical statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his doctoral advisor was Charles Joel Stone. His dissertation was titled Fisher Information and Estimators of Location-Scale Parameters.[4]
Career
After completing his doctorate, Cohen joined the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1979–1987), where he contributed to survey methodology and research on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. With John P. Sommers, he developed methods for estimating cost weights in the CPI that were implemented in the 1987 CPI Revision.[5]
At the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS), he was lead mathematical statistician for the U.S. Commodity Flow Survey (2000–2002) and later served as the BTS Assistant Director for Survey Programs (2002–2006) overseeing BTS statistical surveys.[6]
Cohen served as an associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association from 2004 to 2006.[14][15][16].He has been an associate editor of the Journal of Official Statistics since 2003,[17] and a consulting editor of the Journal of Experimental Education since 2010.[18] He is a frequent reviewer (referee) for journals. Sage Journals wrote of Cohen: "As a reviewer for Educational Policy, you have contributed to excellence in research in 2025. Your expertise has advanced knowledge and ensured the quality and integrity of your research area, while building on your own professional profile in doing so."[19]
Professional activities
Cohen was President of the Washington Academy of Sciences from 2003 to 2004. As President, Cohen oversaw the organization and holding of the Academy's "highly successful First Capital Science Conference." [10] He was President of the Washington Statistical Society from 2007 to 2008.[20]
He served as a member of the Congress of the Mathematical Association of America from 2018 to 2021.[1][2] He also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Academies of Science.[21]
In addition to his leadership roles, Cohen authored the article "Influential Statisticians of Yesteryear Active in the Washington Statistical Society," which documented how many nationally and internationally recognized statisticians began their professional involvement through the Washington (D.C.) Statistical Society.[22]
Selected publications
With Lynn Kuo, Cohen investigated the decision‑theoretic properties of the empirical distribution function.[23][24] According to the book by Ghosh and Meeden (1997)[25], an argument linking multinomial problems with nonparametric problems [23] "... was first noted by Cohen and Kuo (1985), who demonstrated that the empirical distribution function is an admissible estimator of F itself for a certain nonparametric problem. Brown (1988)[26] used similar arguments to study the admissibility of various nonparametric estimators."
He studied how to design statistical surveys when the data are to be analyzed by multilevel models.[27][28] According to the Handbook of Multilevel Analysis: "Cohen [7][27] derives optimal sample size formulae for surveys based on several optimality criteria for the fixed and random part" [29] and "The optimal sample sizes for estimating the variance components as efficiently as possible given the cost restriction ... were derived by Cohen [7][27]."[30]
With coauthors, he researched the behavior of rural high school graduates after graduation, in one of the earliest applications of logistic multilevel models.[31]
He developed the Bayesian bootstrap for unequal probability sampling.[33] Dong, Elliott, and Raghunathan (2014) state "Cohen (1997) extended the FPBB [Finite Population Bayesian Bootstrap] procedure to adjust for the unequal probabilities of selection." [34] who then further extended the FPBB procedure.
He explored statistical hypothesis testing when the null hypothesis is an interval.[35][36]
In philosophy of science, he conducted research in formal epistemology.[37][38] In their book Bayesian Philosophy of Science[39], Sprenger and Hartmann state: "The most interesting alternative characterization (up to ordinal equivalence) is due to Cohen (2015)[37] and consists of three conditions: (i) all tautological hypotheses receive constant explanatory power;(ii) the strong symmetry condition E(¬E, H) = −E(E, H); (iii) a somewhat stronger version of Deductive Entailment."
References
123Who's Who in America, 70th edition, A. N. Marquis Company
123Who's Who in the World, 33rd Edition, A. N. Marquis Company
↑Cohen, Michael P., and John P. Sommers. "Evaluation of methods of composite estimation of cost weights for the CPI." In Proceedings of the Section on Business and Economics Statistics, American Statistical Association, 1984.
↑"AAAS Fellows". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved October 13, 2025.
↑"AERA Fellows List"(PDF). American Educational Research Association. Retrieved October 13, 2025.
↑"ASA Fellows". American Statistical Association. Retrieved October 13, 2025.
12Madsen, Lynnette D. (2023). "Presidents of the Washington Academy of Sciences: A Historical Perspective for the Quasquicentennial". Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. 109 (1): 1–20.
↑"ISI Elected Members". International Statistical Institute. Retrieved October 13, 2025.
12Cohen, Michael P., and Lynn Kuo. "The admissibility of the empirical distribution function." The Annals of Statistics 13, no. 1 (1985a): 262–271.
↑Cohen, M. P., and L. Kuo. "Minimax sampling strategies for estimating a finite population distribution function." Statistics & Risk Modeling 3, no. 3–4 (1985b): 205–224.
↑ Ghosh, Malay, and Meeden, Glen (1997), Bayesian Methods for Finite Population Sampling, Chapman & Hall/CRC, p. 137.
↑Brown, Lawrence D. "Admissibility in discrete and continuous invariant nonparametric problems and in their multinomial analogs." Annals of Statistics, no. 16 (1988): 1567-1593.
123Cohen, Michael P. "Determining sample sizes for surveys with data analyzed by hierarchical linear models." Journal of Official Statistics 14, no. 3 (1998): 267–276.
↑Cohen, Michael P. "Sample size considerations for multilevel surveys." International Statistical Review 73, no. 3 (2005): 279–287.
↑ Moerbeek, Mirjam, Van Breukelen, Gerald J. P., and Berger, Martijn P. F. (2008), "Optimal Designs for Multilevel Studies," In Handbook of Multilevel Analysis (eds. Jan de Leeuw and Erik Meijer), Springer, New York, p. 178.
↑ Moerbeek, Mirjam, Van Breukelen, Gerald J. P., and Berger, Martijn P. F. (2008), "Optimal Designs for Multilevel Studies," In Handbook of Multilevel Analysis (eds. Jan de Leeuw and Erik Meijer), Springer, New York, p. 197.
↑Huang, Gary G., Stanley Weng, Fan Zhang, and Michael P. Cohen. "Outmigration among rural high school graduates: The effect of academic and vocational programs." Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 19, no. 4 (1997): 360–372.
↑Wright, Douglas, and Michael P. Cohen. "National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): Nonresponse Study." (1993). ERIC ED363666
↑Cohen, Michael P. "The Bayesian bootstrap and multiple imputation for unequal probability sample designs." In Proceedings of the Survey Research Methods Section, American Statistical Association, 635–638. 1997.
↑Dong, Q., Elliott, M. R., and Raghunathan, T. E. (2014). A nonparametric method to generate synthetic populations to adjust for complex sampling design features Survey Methodology, 40(1), 29.
↑Cohen, Michael P. "Why not an interval null hypothesis." Journal of Data Science 17, no. 2 (2021): 383–390.
↑Cohen, Michael P. "Interval null hypotheses when different intervals are considered." Far East Journal of Theoretical Statistics 68, no. 2 (2024): 263–269.
12Cohen, Michael P. "On Schupbach and Sprenger’s measures of explanatory power." Philosophy of Science 82, no. 1 (2015): 97–109.
↑Cohen, Michael P. "On three measures of explanatory power with axiomatic representations." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67, no. 4 (2016): 1077–1089.
↑Sprenger, Jan, and Stephen Hartmann (2019). Bayesian Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press, p. 181.
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