Kansas State University Libraries New Prairie Press Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture 2002 - 14th Annual Conference Proceedings THE COMPLETELY SUFFICIENT STATISTICIAN (CSS) Ralph G. O'Brien Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/agstatconference Part of the Agriculture Commons, and the Applied Statistics Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation O'Brien, Ralph G. (2002). "THE COMPLETELY SUFFICIENT STATISTICIAN (CSS)," Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture. https://doi.org/10.4148/2475-7772.1196 This is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences at New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture Kansas State University Applied Statistics in Agriculture 1 THE COMPLETELY SUFFICIENT STATISTICIAN (CSS) Ralph G. O'Brien Department ofBiostatistics and Epidemiology Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland, OH 44195 Today's ideal statistical scientist develops and maintains a broad range of technical skills and personal qualities in four domains: (1) numeracy, in mathematics and numerical computing; (2) articulacy and people skills; (3) literacy, in technical writing and in programm,ing; and (4) graphicacy. Yet, many of these components are given short shrift in university statistics programs. Can even the best statistician today really be "completely sufficient?" Introduction Let me start by saying that I was absolutely delighted, grateful, and humbled to be invited to give the workshop and keynote address at this meeting. Contributing this article to the Proceedings gives me a chance to again thank George Milliken and everyone else en masse who displayed such kindness, who seemed interested in what I had to say, and who endured my stories and even chuckled at my quips. I just hope that my substantive contributions to the conference proved worthy. This will forever be one of the highlights of my career. In that I was already giving a full-day workshop and also because the conference was loaded with many excellent technical presentations, I reasoned that people might appreciate a keynote talk that was lighter in substance, less formal in tone, and yet still thought provoking. I decided that a conference on statistics in agriculture might be a receptive place to deliver a homily on matters that have been fermenting in my head for a long time. Please bear with me as I try to answer: What skills do we need to be "completely sufficient statisticians" in this new millennium? Where am I coming from'? Like you, my opinions stem from my experiences, so let me set the stage by telling you a bit about myself. I'll bet that my formal training in statistics was quite different from yours, and that I've wandered more than usual over my 27 -year career path. This has allowed me to see our profession from various perspectives. &; an undergraduate mathematics major at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) in California, I was introduced to statistics by Professor Janet Myhre, who is a Real Statistician. I loved it when she drifted from the day's set lesson to discuss her former and current consulting projects. Some of us even worked on those projects as paid student assistants and for our required senior theses. For one class assignment, Dr. Myhre had us (unofficially) review a manuscript submitted to Teclmometrics. Not bad for being mere undergraduates, eh? I went immediately to graduate school in operations research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, earning my MS degree. People are usually surprised to learn that my PhD from UNC was not from the Departments of Statistics or Biostatistics, but rather was New Prairie Press https://newprairiepress.org/agstatconference/2002/proceedings/2 Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture Kansas State University 2 Kansas State University from the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Lab. Like many key events in one's life, my becoming a "Lab student" happened largely by accident (a long story), but it was no accident that I used the opportunity to take statistics courses in three very different graduate programs: Statistics, Biostatistics, and Psychometrics. In addition I was required to take several courses in the science of psychology. I gleaned a precious "statistical gestalt" from all this heterogeneity. With my doctorate in hand in 1975, I joined the Psychology faculty at the University of Virginia. But as I increasingly became a rather mainstream academic statistician with broad subject-matter interests, I realized that I needed to find a home in a real statistics department, which UVA did not have. Accordingly, in 1982 I joined the Statistics Department at the University ofTennessee, Knoxville. Still experiencing some wanderlust, my interests then moved sharply towards biomedicine, but UTK has no major health sciences center. So, in 1989 I joined the Division of Biostatistics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Florida. In 1994 I left regular academia to join the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. The best thing I seem to do is teach, and I love it. At UVA and UTK, my courses served doctoral students from subject-matter disciplines: experimental psychology, environmental science, industrial/organizational psychology, marketing, accounting, animal science, plant and soil science, ecology, journalism, and others. I did not do much teaching at UF, where my main role was to bring in grant funding and figure out how to get a dollar's worth of work done when the grant only paid 75 cents, if that. At the Cleveland Clinic I now teach non-credit seminar courses to ever-busy physician investigators who want to learn the basic concepts in clinical biostatistics. Because our docs start seeing patients by 9am, we meet at 7am, complete with continental breakfast. It's great fun. I was fully exposed to computers and scientific programming before I was 20. Even as early as 1968, all the CMC math majors were given a key to the college's "IBM 1620 Lab," giving me 24 X 7 hands-on accessibility. (My habit for all-night programming episodes was formed early.) For my senior thesis, Dr. Myhre arranged for me to do a computer simulation study of the light­ rail passenger system being planned for the new Dallas-Fort Worth airport. This pushed me to try something new in computing. The National Science Foundation had funded a demonstration project to place teletype terminals around colleges and universities in Southern California to see if people could tele-compute eHectively with a multi-user computer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, some 35 miles away. This was before modems, so the connections were via dedicated lines. It worked great for me-as long as the single line to Claremont was working. Unfortunately, this communication died rwo weeks before my thesis was due, so I never finished it. My luck soared in graduate school, where the UNC Psychometric Lab had truly cutting-edge and reliable computing resources (hardware, sofrware, and peopleware), and the Lab's graduate students had full access to all of this. Have you heard of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation? It is a large non-profit health sciences center similar to the Mayo Clinic. Both can be described in terms of a tricycle. The front wheel is a huge health care delivery system, which helps drive the rwo rear wheels of education and research. I think of "The Clinic" and "The Mayo" as "academoid" institutions, hybrids of industry and academia. Cleveland Clinic researchers publish over 2500 articles annually. The New Prairie Press https://newprairiepress.org/agstatconference/2002/proceedings/2 Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture Kansas State University Applied Statistics in Agriculture 3 Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University will open in 2004. I direct the Department of Biostatistics' Collaborative Biostatistics Center (CBC), a group of about 40 professionals making up 6 teams that consult and collaborate with Cleveland Clinic researchers on over 600 projects annually. The bulk of the CBC's project effort and functional leadership comes from MS-level biostatisticians who work directly and independently with physician scientists. CBC biostatisticians earn co-authorships on over 125 publications per year. We could double in size and still have more work than we could handle completely. This is the norm in clinical biostatistics today. It's a challenge for everyone involved. The best thing about directing the CBC is that its members are so skilled and dedicated. The worst thing about the role is finding, recruiting, and retaining such people. We are constantly searching for people who are striving to become Completely Sufficient Statisticians (CSS). What is that? " ... all four types of ability" The statistical scientist's raison detre is to improve empirical studies conducted by subject­ matter investigators (Figure 1). Statisticians are professional experts in the art and science of Study Design & Statistical Planning Compromise, but: "Don't make the wrong mistake:' •. New Knowledge never complete Figure 1. Statistical expertise is integral to planning and conducting empirical research. designing studies, analyzing data, and communicating the results. The research questions range from elegantly straightforward to utterly tangled-to wholly unformed. Whatever the case, we must define a sound study design and plan specific statistical models and tests. No design is perfect, so compromises are required. But as the legendary New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra said, "Don't make the wrong mistake." Textbook data appears from paradise, clean and orderly and complete, but real data often flies in from a Kansas tornado, dirty and disorganized and crippled by missingness.