Yoav Benjamini, Daniel Yekutieli and Ruth Heller of the Statistics and Operations Research Department of the University of Tel Aviv (TAU, for its acronym in English), received an important international award for their scientific advances.
As reported by the university on Tuesday, the three researchers received the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, who has a prize of 1 million dollars, for his work in the field of statistics.
The scientists studied the false discovery rate (FDR), which is a method of conceptualizing the error rate in null hypothesis testing when multiple comparisons are made. The methodology was developed by Benjamini and Yosef Hochberg in the 1990s, with the goal of discovering errors in large data sets.
After this first article, published in 1995, Benjamini and the then students and now professors, Yekutieli and Heller, managed to get the FDR method used in multiple fields.
Benjamini explained that “the concept of FDR was born from a need in medical research, specifically in studies that examine large numbers of success parameters to evaluate new treatments, adding that “today, FDR methods are applied in a wide variety from fields, such as genomics, neuroscience, agriculture, economics, behavioral sciences, astronomy, and more.”