2023 International Prize in Statistics

Source: The Indian Express

Why in News?

Calayampudi Radhakrishna Rao, a prominent Indian-American mathematician and statistician, will be awarded the 2023 International Prize in Statistics, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in the field.

What are the Works of C R Rao?

Background:

Rao's remarkable paper, published in 1945 in the Bulletin of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, demonstrated three fundamental results that paved the way for the modern field of statistics and provided statistical tools heavily used in science today.

Theory:

The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound:

Provides a means of knowing when a method for estimating a quantity is as good as any method can be.

The Rao-Blackwell Theorem:

Provides a means of transforming an estimate into an optimal estimate. Together, these results form a foundation on which much of statistics is built.

The Information Geometry:

Provided insights that pioneered a new interdisciplinary field that has flourished as "information geometry.

Information geometry is the study of the geometrical structure of families of probability distributions.

What is the Significance of Rao’s Contribution?

1. His work on information geometry has aided the understanding and optimization of Higgs boson measurements at the Large Hadron Collider, and contributed to advancements in artificial intelligence, data science, signal processing, shape classification, and image segregation.
2. The Rao-Blackwell process has been applied to stereology, particle filtering, and computational econometrics, among others.
3. The Cramer-Rao lower bound is of great importance in diverse fields such as signal processing, spectroscopy, radar systems, multiple image radiography, risk analysis, and quantum physics.

What Other Awards Conferred to C R Rao?

• Padma Bhushan in1968.
• Padma Vibhushan in 2001.