Tel Aviv University team wins international $1 million statistics prize

Three Tel Aviv University researchers have jointly won the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, which comes with a $1 million award, the university announced Tuesday.

Professors Yoav Benjamini, Daniel Yekutieli, and Ruth Heller of the TAU Department of Statistics and Operations Research were granted the prize for their work on false discovery rate (FDR), a statistical methodology for discovering errors among large datasets, first described by Benjamini and the late professor Yosef Hochberg in the 1990s.

Benjamini and Hochberg’s work “conflicted with widely accepted criteria” of the time but their breakthrough paper eventually became “one of the most highly cited papers in the scientific world,” the university noted in a statement.

That first paper, “Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing,” published in 1995 in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, has been cited in peer-reviewed scientific publications almost 110,000 times, according to Google Scholar.

In subsequent years, Benjamini and his students Yekutieli and Heller, who would eventually become professors themselves, expanded this initial effort, enabling the FDR method to be used in multiple fields by “applying it to challenges in genomics and neuroscience and proposing methods for assessing the reproducibility of scientific findings,” TAU said.

“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 in a statement. “Today FDR methods are applied in a wide variety of fields, such as: genomics – where researchers investigate tens of thousands of genetic indicators for certain diseases; neuroscience – where studies look for parts of the brain activated by specific tasks, such as face recognition; and also 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,” Benjamini said.

“I hope that even in these difficult times for Israel and for the region, our societies will allow academia to sustain an open and healthy environment, enabling continued scientific growth that benefits mankind with no borders,” he added.

The Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, a biannual prize only inaugurated in 2022, honors “an outstanding contribution or tool that has had significant impact and found wide application in statistical practice, with relevance to society,” according to the prize website.

The award is overseen by the Belgium-based King Baudouin Foundation.