statistics

The R Core team has been awarded the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics in 2026, recognizing their contributions to statistical computing.

Analysis of multiple studies shows that social sharing buttons are rarely clicked (about 0.2% of visitors). Users instead copy and paste URLs, making 'dark social' a major traffic source.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has ordered a ban on noise infusion in all statistical products from the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which could undermine differential privacy protections and statistical accuracy.

The article traces the widely cited '300% AI agent adoption surge' statistic to its source and finds that the data actually shows a near doubling of deployment intent, not actual production deployment, with only about 1 in 10 companies that deploy agents scaling them. It warns against using fabricated stats for planning.

Elon Musk tweets that Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised mode was over 3 times safer than manual driving on Dutch roads over the past two months.

An analysis of rsync release history examines whether Claude-assisted commits introduced more bugs, using a permutation test on bugs per 10 commits. The findings suggest no statistically significant increase in bugs for Claude-assisted releases compared to historical distribution.

This paper introduces a distributional generalization of matrix completion where each entry is a probability distribution rather than a scalar, using kernel mean embeddings and Tucker rank to capture low-rank structure. The authors propose a novel estimator with non-asymptotic error bounds and demonstrate effectiveness on synthetic and real-world data.

This paper formalizes pairwise reference alignment as a model-level ordinal observable, defining a statistic to measure agreement between a model's scoring and a reference preference distribution, with finite-sample estimators and an empirical study on Qwen2.5 models and RewardBench.

OpenAI has hired statistician Weijie Su, a top graduate from Peking University and winner of the 'Nobel Prize of Statistics', who will train AI models while on leave from Wharton.

Explains the Student's t-distribution correction for small sample confidence intervals, providing a memorizable table for 90% intervals and a rule-of-thumb for estimating standard deviation from two samples.