William S. Cleveland

William S. Cleveland: Bio

William S. Cleveland is a Professor of Statistics and Courtesy Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. Previous to this he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Statistics Research Department at Bell Labs, Murray Hill; for 12 of his years at Bell Labs he was a Department Head.
His areas of Research have included data visualization, computer networking, machine learning, data mining, time series, statistical modeling, visual perception, environmental science, and seasonal adjustment.
Cleveland has been involved in many projects requiring the mining, statistical analysis, and modeling of data from several fields including environmental science, customer opinion polling, visual perception, and computer networking. In the course of this work he has developed many new statistical models and methods, including visualization methods, that are widely used in engineering, science, medicine, and business.
He has participated in the design and implementation of software for the trellis display framework for visualization that he and colleagues developed, and for the loess approach to nonparametric function estimation that he introduced into statistics and machine learning. The software is now a part of many commercial systems.
Cleveland has published over 120 papers on his research in a wide range of scientific journals, refereed proceedings, and books. In the area of data visualization he has written three books and one user's manual, edited two books, and edited a special issue of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. He was the editor-in-chief of the seven volumes of the Collected Works of John W. Tukey, and for ten years was an editor of the Wadsworth Probability and Statistics Series. His two books The Elements of Graphing Data and Visualizing Data have been reviewed in dozens of journals, and Elements was selected for the Library of Science.
He is a principal investigator in the Network Modeling and Simulation Program of DARPA where he works on statistical modeling for generating background packet-level traffic and source-level traffic in simulators, on bandwidth allocation, on validation of network simulator models, and on packet sampling.
Cleveland has twice won the Wilcoxon Prize and once won the Youden prize from the statistics journal Technometrics . He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In 1996 he was chosen Statistician of the Year by the Chicago Chapter of the American Statistical Association. In 2002 he was selected as a Highly Cited Researcher by the American Society for Information Science & Technology in the newly formed mathematics category.
He was the founding chair of the Graphics Section of the American Statistical Association, and has served on the Council of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council, and the Council of the Statistics Section of the American Association of the Advancement of Science.
Cleveland received an A.B. in Mathematics from Princeton where his senior thesis advisor was probabilist William Feller. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Yale Univerity where his Ph.D. thesis advisor was statistician Leonard Jimme Savage.