Nicky Best

Nicola G. "Nicky" Best is a statistician known for her work on the deviance information criterion in Bayesian inference ^{[B] [E]} and as a developer of Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling. ^{[1] [A] [D]} She is a former professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London and is currently a biostatistician for GlaxoSmithKline. ^[2]

Education and career

Best earned a master's degree in medical statistics from the University of Leicester in 1990 ^[2] and then a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge, supervised by David Spiegelhalter. ^[3] She joined the Imperial College faculty in 1996. ^[1] She moved from Imperial to GlaxoSmithKline in 2014. ^[2]

She was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), from 2001 to 2004. ^[4]

Recognition

Best won the Guy Medal in Bronze of the Royal Statistical Society in 2004. ^[5] In 2018, she won the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society "for her exquisite expositions of Bayesian methods through BUGS software, workshops, lectures, prior elicitations, textbooks and peer-review publications; and for substantive applications ranging from clinical trials and cost-effectiveness to epidemiology and, most recently, the optimization of pharmaceutical research programmes". ^[6]

Selected publications

A.	David J. Lunn; Andrew Thomas; Nicky Best; David J. Spiegalhalter (2000), "WinBUGS - A Bayesian modelling framework: Concepts, structure, and extensibility", Statistics and Computing , 10 (4): 325–337, doi:10.1023/A:1008929526011, ISSN   0960-3174, Wikidata   Q108929102

B.

David J. Spiegelhalter; Nicola G. Best; Bradley P. Carlin; Angelika van der Linde (October 2002), "Bayesian measures of model complexity and fit", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 64 (4): 583–639, doi:10.1111/1467-9868.00353, ISSN   1369-7412, Zbl   1067.62010, Wikidata   Q56532420

C.	Martyn Plummer; Nicky Best; Kate Cowles; Karen Vines (2006), "CODA: convergence diagnosis and output analysis for MCMC", Rnews, 6 (1): 7, Wikidata   Q108929147

D.	David Lunn; David Spiegelhalter; Andrew Thomas; Nicky Best (10 November 2009), "The BUGS project: Evolution, critique and future directions", Statistics in Medicine , 28 (25): 3049–67, doi:10.1002/SIM.3680, ISSN   0277-6715, PMID   19630097, Wikidata   Q28252857

E.

David J. Spiegelhalter; Nicola G. Best; Bradley P. Carlin; Angelika van der Linde (8 April 2014), "The deviance information criterion: 12 years on", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 76 (3): 485–493, doi:10.1111/RSSB.12062, ISSN   1369-7412, Zbl   1411.62027, Wikidata   Q108929214

References

1. "Nicky Best", Speaker biographies, ESF 2014, retrieved 2019-09-13
2. "Professor Nicky Best", Industry and innovation case studies, The Royal Society, retrieved 2019-09-13
3. "Curriculum vitae" (PDF), Understanding Uncertainty, retrieved 2019-05-10
4. Professor Nicky Best: Honours and Memberships, Imperial College London, retrieved 2019-09-13
5. "Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews, retrieved 2019-09-13
6. "RSS announces recipients of 2018 honours", StatsLife, Royal Statistical Society, 22 January 2018, retrieved 2019-09-13

External links

• Nicky Best publications indexed by Google Scholar