William S. Cleveland

Not to be confused with Bill Cleveland.

William S. Cleveland
Born	1943 (age 81–82)
Citizenship	American
Alma mater	Princeton University Yale University
Known for	Dot plot Local regression S (programming language)
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics Computer science
Institutions	Bell Labs (Murray Hill) Purdue University
Thesis	Time series projections, theory and practice  (1969)
Doctoral advisor	Leonard Jimmie Savage

William Swain Cleveland II (born 1943) is an American computer scientist and professor of statistics and professor of computer science at Purdue University, known for his work on data visualization, particularly on nonparametric regression ^[1] and local regression. ^[2] He is remembered as one of the developers of the S programming language. ^[3]

Biography

Cleveland obtained his AB in Mathematics mid 1960s from Princeton University, where he graduated under William Feller. For his PhD studies in Statistics he moved to Yale University, where he graduated in 1969 under Leonard Jimmie Savage. ^{[4] [5]}

After graduation Cleveland started at Bell Labs, where he was staff member of the Statistics Research Department and Department Head for 12 years. While at Bell Labs, he helped to develop the S programming language, a precursor to R. ^[3] Eventually he moved to the Purdue University, where he became Professor of Statistics and Courtesy Professor of Computer Science. In 1982 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. ^[6]

His research interests are in the fields of "data visualization, computer networking, machine learning, data mining, time series, statistical modeling, visual perception, environmental science, and seasonal adjustment." ^[7] Cleveland is credited with defining and naming the field of data science, which he did in a 2001 publication. ^[8]

Professor Cleveland is listed as retired as of January 1, 2025. ^[9]

Honors and awards

Cleveland received the Wilcoxon Award from Technometrics in 1975 and 1977. He received the Youden Prize from Technometrics in 1987 along with Richard A. Becker at Bell Labs for their paper Brushing scatterplots. ^[10] He was named the National Statistician of the Year, Chicago chapter of the American Statistical Association in 1996. In 2016, Cleveland received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Graphics and Computing from the American Statistical Association, and the Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation from Texas A&M University. In 2021, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Hasselt University. ^[11]

Bibliography

Books

• Cleveland, William S. The elements of graphing data. Monterey, CA: Wadsworth Advanced Books and Software, 1985.
• Cleveland, William S.; McGill, Marylyn E. (1988). Dynamic graphics for statistics. The Wadsworth & Brooks-Cole statistics-probability series. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth. ISBN   978-0-534-09144-6.
• Cleveland, William S. Visualizing data. Hobart Press, 1993.

Selected publications

• Cleveland, William S. "Robust locally weighted regression and smoothing scatterplots." Journal of the American statistical association 74.368 (1979): 829–836.
• Cleveland, William S., and Robert McGill. "Graphical perception: Theory, experimentation, and application to the development of graphical methods." Journal of the American statistical association 79.387 (1984): 531–554.
• Cleveland, William S., and Susan J. Devlin. "Locally weighted regression: an approach to regression analysis by local fitting." Journal of the American Statistical Association 83.403 (1988): 596–610.
• Cleveland, William S., Eric Grosse, and William M. Shyu. "Local regression models." Statistical models in S (1992): 309–376.

References

1. Armitage, Peter, Geoffrey Berry, and John NS Matthews. Statistical methods in medical research. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
2. Venables, William N., and Brian D. Ripley. Modern applied statistics with S. Springer Science & Business Media, 2002.
3. Berry, Kenneth J.; Johnston, Janis E.; Jr, Paul W. Mielke (2014-04-11). A Chronicle of Permutation Statistical Methods: 1920–2000, and Beyond. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 207. ISBN   978-3-319-02744-9.
4. William S. Cleveland, CV Archived 2015-09-24 at the Wayback Machine , at stat.purdue.edu. Accessed 10-04-2015.
5. "William Swain Cleveland, II". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 2 July 2022.
6. View/Search Fellows of the ASA Archived 2016-06-16 at the Wayback Machine , accessed 2016-10-15.
7. William S. Cleveland: Bio Archived 2015-07-09 at the Wayback Machine , at stat.purdue.edu. Accessed 10-04-2015.
8. Brady, Henry E. (2019-05-11). "The Challenge of Big Data and Data Science". Annual Review of Political Science. 22 (1): 297–323. doi: 10.1146/annurev-polisci-090216-023229 . ISSN   1094-2939.
9. "Retiree Recognition - Human Resources - Purdue University". www.purdue.edu. Retrieved 2025-11-11.
10. "Back Matter". Technometrics. 50 (1). 2008. ISSN   0040-1706.
11. "William S. Cleveland Receives Honorary Doctorate from Hasselt University - Department of Statistics - Purdue University". www.stat.purdue.edu.

External links

• William S. Cleveland, Shanti S. Gupta Professor of Statistics, Courtesy Professor of Computer Science
• William Cleveland at the Mathematics Genealogy Project