Three Tel Aviv University professors won the prestigious $1 million Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics awarded by the Brussels-based King Baudouin Foundation, the university announced on Tuesday.
Professors Yoav Benjamini, Daniel Yekutieli and Ruth Heller from the school’s Department of Statistics and Operations Research won for their work on False Discovery Rate (FDR).
Their work enables the scanning of large numbers of experimental results and selecting real discoveries, while limiting the number of false discoveries.
Benjamini and the late Professor Yosef Hochberg first presented the FDR criterion, expressed it mathematically, and proposed a method for identifying a maximum number of discoveries while maintaining a desirable FDR.
At the time, this paper conflicted with widely accepted criteria, and consequently its publication was delayed for years.
Now it is one of the most highly cited papers in the scientific world. Benjamini was joined by his students Yekutieli and Heller, who continued in his footsteps, adding further innovations to the theory of FDR.
Their work has enabled the extension of the Benjamini-Hochberg method’s uses beyond the original paper.
“The concept of FDR was born from a need in medical research, specifically studies examining large numbers of success parameters to evaluate new treatments,” Benjamini said.
“However, in statistics a new approach established in one field of research can also impact other areas. Today, FDR methods are applied in a wide variety of fields, such as genomics, neuroscience, agriculture, economics, behavioral sciences, astronomy and more.
“All these fields share a need to scan enormous quantities of possible results and ultimately find real discoveries in mountains of data,” he said.
“I am very happy about the expressed appreciation for our research. Winning the Rousseeuw Prize is the outcome of a long process, planted and cultivated in Israel for many years, in a fertile academic substrate, that grew into the global world of science,” Benjamini added.
The biennial $1 million prize founded in 2022 honors outstanding innovations in statistical research that profoundly impact society.
