Classic references in Statistics (created 2010-06-29).

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A prominent statistician, Christian Robert, listed some classic research papers in Statistics that he wanted to present to his students in a special readings class. This was commented on by another prominent statistician, Andrew Gelman. I'm not a prominent statistician, but that won't stop me from adding my two cents.

The original 15 articles suggested by Christian Robert are found at:

http://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~xian/M2classics

The commentary by Andrew Gelman can be found at:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010/06/classics_of_sta.html

Here are some others that I think might be added to the list

  1. Kaplan, E. L.; Meier, P.: Nonparametric estimation from incomplete observations. J. Amer. Statist. Assn. 53:457�481, 1958. This paper started a major branch of Statistics, survival analysis.
  2. Cornfield J (1951). A method of estimating comparative rates from clinical data; applications to cancer of the lung, breast, and cervix. J Natl Cancer Inst 11: 1269�1275. This paper demonstrated that the odds ratio from a case-control design does indeed have a meaningful interpretation, in spite of the seemingly backwards method for selecting subjects.
  3. Hill AB. "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 58 (1965), 295-300. This paper shows criteria that can help establish a cause and effect relationship with observational studies.
  4. Liang, K.-Y. and Zeger, S. L. (1986). Longitudinal data analysis using generalized linear models. Biometrika 73, 13-22. This paper introduced generalized estimating equations.
  5. Ware, J.H. (1982) "Random-Effects Models for Longitudinal Data", Biometrics, 38, 963�974. This paper introduced mixed linear models.
  6. Bland JM, Altman DG (1986). "Statistical methods for assessing agreement between two methods of clinical measurement". Lancet 1 (8476): 307�10. This paper showed a simple graphical approach to compare two raters.