Yoav Benjamini was awarded for his Benjamini-Hochberg 1995 paper “Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing” (J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 57, 1995, no. 1, 289–300).
The paper by Benjamini and Hochberg, cited more than 50,000 times, introduced the false discovery rate or FDR that is widely used in diverse sciences to make simultaneous inference about a large number of hypotheses. FDR liberalizes the threshold for identifying hypotheses worth further investigation while at the same time controlling the rate of false discoveries. It has become an essential part of the analysis pipeline of complex data around the world. In addition to its wide applicability, the FDR paper includes elegant mathematical statistics.
See also:
- The False Discovery Rate | Stats + Stories Episode 108 with Yoav Benjamini
- ISI President’s Tribute to 2019 Pearson Prize Winner Yoav Benjamini
- Thank you video message from Yoav Benjamini
The prize was presented at the 62nd ISI World Statistics Congress in Kuala Lumpur.