Sustainable education for professional Statisticians

Presenter

• Pedro Luis do Nascimento Silva (National School of Statistical Science)

Abstract

Statistics as a profession is facing increasing challenges from reality:

• Big data and the associated revolution in data availability, accessibility, speed of production and pressure to “do something” with the available data;
• Artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining and many other trends where the “art and science” of data analysis, modeling and inference are being taken up by software which is evolving at a very fast pace, and which aims to depend less and less on the competence and skills of the users;
• Increasing costs of traditional education via in-person courses;
• Fast evolution of methodology and technology, demanding increasing investment of time and effort to keep up with the developments;
• Ever wider areas of application of Statistics with their own dialects, and their promotion of “do-it-yourself” by practitioners who do not possess broad statistical education, but who master very complex and specialized statistical tools (models, methods and software) relevant to their fields.

Given such challenges, how can statistics education deliver Statisticians who can thrive in these challenging times and help keep them “fit” throughout their careers? In this talk we consider some ideas to meet this challenge.