Benini,Rodolpho(1862^1956): Born in Cremona, Italy, Rodolpho was appointed to the Chair of
History of Economics at Bari at the early age of 27. From 1928 to his death in 1956 he was
Professor of Statistics at Rome University. One of the founders of
demography
as a separate
science.
Benjamin, Bernard (1910^2002): Benjamin was educated at Colfe’s Grammar School in
Lewisham, South London, and later at Sir John Cass College, London, where he studied
physics. He began his working life as an actuarial assistant to the London County Council
pension fund and in 1941 qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries. After World War
II he became Chief Statistician at the General Register Office and was later appointed as
Director of Statistics at the Ministry of Health. In the 1970s Benjamin joined City
University, London as the Foundation Professor of Actuarial Science. He published many
papers and books in his career primarily in the areas of
actuarial statistics
and
demography
.
Benjamin was made President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1970–2 and received the
society’s highest honour, the Guy medal in gold, in 1986.
Be njam ini an d Hochberg step -up methods: Methods used in
bioinformatics
to control the
false discovery rate
when calculating p-values from g tests under g individual null hypoth-
eses, one for each gene. [Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 1995, 57,
289–300.]
Bennett’s biva riate sign test: A test of the null hypothesis that a
bivariate distribution
has
specified marginal medians. [Metrika, 1967, 12,22–28.]
Bentle r ^ Bonnett index: A goodness of fit measure used in
structural equation modelling
.
[Modelling Covariances and Latent Variables using EQS, 1993, G. Dunn, B. Everitt and
A. Pickles, CRC/Chapman and Hall, London.]
Berkson,Joseph(1899^1982): Born in New York City, Berkson studied physics at Columbia
University, before receiving a Ph.D. in medicine from Johns Hopkins University in
1927, and a D.Sc. in statistics from the same university in 1928. In 1933 he became
Head of Biometry and Medical Statistics at the Mayo Clinic, a post he held until his
retirement in 1964. His research interests covered all aspects of medical statistics and
from 1928 to 1980 he published 118 scientific papers. Involved in a number of
controversies particularly that involving the role of cigarette smoking in lung cancer,
Berkson enjoyed a long and colourful career. He died on 12 September 1982 in
Rochester, Minnesota.
Berkson’sfallacy: The existence of artifactual correlations between diseases or between a disease
and a risk factor arising from the interplay of differential admission rates from an underlying
population to a select study group, such as a series of hospital admissions. In any study that
purports to establish an association and where it appears likely that differential rates of
admission apply, then at least some portion of the observed association should be suspect as
attributable to this phenomenon. See also Simpson’s paradox and spurious correlation.
[SMR Chapter 5.]
Berman’sdiagnostic: An ad hoc method for model checking when point process models are fitted
to spatial point pattern data. [Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 2005, 67,
617–666.]
Berman-Turner device: A method for maximizing the
likelihoods
of inhomogeneous spatial
Poisson processes
, using standard software for
generalized linear models
.[Journal of the
Royal Statistical Society, Series C, 1992, 41,31–38.]
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