Drawing on “The Simpsons” writers’ creative process, this column shows how statisticians can use the “Getting Things Done” system to manage small decisions and free up bandwidth for the big ones.
decision-making
Obituary: Vincent P. Barabba
Vincent P. Barabba, 1990 ASA president and Fellow who twice directed the US Census Bureau and led market research and strategy at Xerox, Kodak, and General Motors, died September 21, 2026.
Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Actions All of Us Can Take Today
With COVID-19 still fresh in our minds and the summer of cyclospora barely in the rearview, there is much Data for Good advocates can do to support a rapid and effective response to new public health threats.
Don’t Just Spin the Bottle: Values, Objectives, and the Cheshire Cat
Values tell you where you want to get to. Without them, we are just spinning the bottle. Objectives turn those values into directions, and this article focuses on them.
As AI Does More Analytics, What Should Statisticians Do More Of?
AI can generate code, fit competing models, produce visualizations, and summarize results at a speed that would have been difficult to imagine not long ago. For statisticians, this raises an uncomfortable but useful question: As AI does more analytics, what should statisticians do more of?
‘Wanna Bet?’ Making Decisions Under Uncertainty
Mark Otto and MinJae Lee discuss a principle proposed by poker pro and cognitive psychologist Annie Duke: Treat decisions as bets.
Meet New Member Jovana Mitic
This month, we’re spotlighting Jovana Mitic, a PhD statistics student at Clemson. She wants to be a data scientist or applied statistician doing modeling that actually gets used, particularly in public health applications.
Applications of NLP, Generative AI in Statistical Modeling and Decision-Making
For statisticians, traditional methods such as data mining, hypothesis testing, and inference have long been the backbone of analysis. These approaches remain powerful, but new tools—especially natural language processing and generative AI—make it easier to uncover insights, automate text-heavy tasks, and support decision-making at scale.
XL-Files: If Statistics Must Die … Let It Go Out with All Its Styles
The survival of statistics as a profession—not just a scientific discipline—depends on embracing its many styles, from modeling to decision-making and consensus-building, especially as data science and AI reshape the landscape.
People News: Bin Yu and Rebecca Barter
ASA members Bin Yu of UC Berkeley and Rebecca Barter of Utah University Medical School recently released the open-access version of their new book, Veridical Data Science: The Practice of Responsible Data Analysis and Decision Making.