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{{short description|Indian statistician}}
{{EngvarB|date=September 2014}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=September 2014}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Debabrata Basu
| image = Debabrata Basu.gif
| alt = Debabrata Basu
| caption = Debabrata Basu
| birth_name =
| birth_date = {{Birth date|df=yes|1924|07|05}}
| birth_place =
| death_date = {{Death date and age|df=yes|2001|03|24|1924|07|05}}
| death_place =
| nationality = Indian
| other_names =
| known_for =
| occupation = Statistician
}}
'''Debabrata Basu''' (5 July 1924 – 24 March 2001) was an Indian statistician who made fundamental contributions to the [[foundations of statistics]]. Basu invented simple examples that displayed some difficulties of [[likelihood function|likelihood]]-based statistics and [[frequentist statistics]]; Basu's paradoxes were especially important in the development of [[survey sampling]]. In [[statistical theory]], [[Basu's theorem]] [[mathematical proof|established]] the [[statistical independence|independence]] of a [[completeness (statistics)|complete]] [[sufficient statistic]] and an [[ancillary statistic]].<ref name="projecteuclid">
Page i in {{cite book| last1=Ghosh|first=Malay| last2=Pathak|first2=Pramod K. | chapter=Preface|title=Current Issues in Statistical Inference—Essays in Honor of D. Basu | editor=Malay Ghosh | editor-link=Malay Ghosh |editor2=Pramod K. Pathak | pages=i–ii | publisher=Institute for Mathematical Statistics | location=Hayward, CA | chapter-url=http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.lnms/1215458836 | doi=10.1214/lnms/1215458836 | mr=1194407 }}</ref>

Basu was associated with the [[Indian Statistical Institute]] in India, and [[Florida State University]] in the United States.<ref name="Page">Page i in "Preface" to IMS festschrift.</ref>

==Biography==
Debabrata Basu was born in [[Dacca]], [[Bengal]], unpartitioned [[India]], now [[Dhaka]], Bangladesh. His father, N. M. Basu, was a mathematician specialising in number theory. Young Basu studied mathematics at [[Dacca University]]. He took a course in statistics as part of the under-graduate honours programme in Mathematics but his ambition was to become a pure mathematician.<ref>
Page xvii in {{cite book|chapter=A Summing Up|first=D.|last=Basu|title=Statistical Information and Likelihood: A Collection of Critical Essays by Dr. D. Basu|editor=J. K. Ghosh|editor-link=J. K. Ghosh|publisher=Springer|year=1988| series=Lecture Notes in Statistics | volume=45 | isbn=0-387-96751-6 | mr=953081 | pages=xvii–xviii}}</ref> After getting his master's degree from Dacca University, Basu taught there from 1947 to 1948.<ref>Page i in "Preface" to IMS festschrift. (C.f., Basu's preface to his collected writings, edited by Ghosh.)</ref>

Following the partition of India in 1947, Basu made several trips to India. In 1948, he moved to Calcutta, where he worked for some time as an [[actuary]] in an insurance company. In 1950, he joined the [[Indian Statistical Institute]] as a research scholar under [[C.R. Rao]].<ref>Page i in "Preface" to IMS festschrift. (C.f., {{cite book|chapter=A Summing Up|first=D.|last=Basu|title=Statistical Information and Likelihood: A Collection of Critical Essays by Dr. D. Basu|editor=J. K. Ghosh|editor-link=J. K. Ghosh|publisher=Springer|year=1988| series=Lecture Notes in Statistics | volume=45 | isbn=0-387-96751-6 | mr=953081 | pages=xvii–xviii}}).</ref>

In 1950, the Indian Statistical Institute was visited by [[Abraham Wald]], who was giving a lecture tour sponsored by the [[International Statistical Institute]]. Wald greatly impressed Basu. Wald had developed a decision-theoretic foundations for statistics in which [[Bayesian statistics]] was a central part, because of Wald's theorem characterising [[admissible decision rule]]s as Bayesian decision rules (or limits of Bayesian decision rules). Wald also showed the power of using [[measure theory|measure-theoretic]] [[probability theory]] in statistics.

He married Kalyani Ray in 1952 and subsequently had two children, Monimala (Moni) Basu and Shantanu Basu. Moni is a journalism professor at the [[University of Florida]]<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.jou.ufl.edu/staff/moni-basu/|title=Moni Basu|work=UF College of Journalism and Communications|access-date=2018-11-10|language=en-US}}</ref> and former [[CNN]] reporter,<ref>[https://www.cnn.com/profiles/moni-basu-profile]</ref> and Shantanu is an astrophysicist at the University of Western Ontario.<ref>[http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~basu/]</ref>

In 1953, after submitting his thesis to the [[University of Calcutta]],<ref name="Page" /> Basu went as a [[Fulbright scholar]] to the [[University of California, Berkeley]]. There Basu had intensive discussions with [[Jerzy Neyman]] and "his brilliant younger colleagues" like [[Erich Leo Lehmann]].<ref>Page xvii in Basu's ''A Summing Up''.</ref> [[Basu's theorem]] comes from this time. Basu thus had a good understanding of the decision-theoretic approach to statistics of Neyman, [[Egon Pearson|Pearson]] and Wald. In fact, Basu is described as having returned from Berkeley to India as a "complete Neyman Pearsonian" by [[J. K. Ghosh]].<ref>Page viii of J. K. Ghosh's pr
eface to the selected essays of Basu.</ref>

Basu met [[Ronald Fisher]] in the winter of 1954–1955; he wrote in 1988, "With his reference set argument, Sir Ronald was trying to find a via media between the two poles of Statistics – Berkeley and Bayes.<ref>The term "Berkeley" has several meanings, here. Basu refers to the leadership of [[Jerzy Neyman]]'s department of statistics at the University of California at Berkeley in the world of frequentist statistics. Secondly, Basu alludes to the British philosopher [[George Berkeley]] who criticized the use of [[infinitesimal]]s in [[mathematical analysis]]; Berkeley's criticisms were answered by [[Thomas Bayes]] in a pamphlet.</ref> My efforts to understand this Fisher compromise led me to the [[likelihood principle]]".<ref>Page xvii in Ghosh (ed.)</ref> In their [[festschrift]] for Basu, the editors [[Malay Ghosh]] and Patak write that

<blockquote>[Basu's] critical examination of both the Neyman–Pearsonian and the Fisherian modes of inference eventually forced him to a Bayesian point of view, via the likelihood route. The final conversion to Bayesianism came in January 1968, when Basu was invited to speak at a Bayesian Session in the Statistics Section of the Indian Science Congress. He confesses that, while preparing for these lectures, he became convinced that Bayesian inference did indeed provide one with a logical resolution of the underlying inconsistencies of both the Neyman–Pearson and the Fisherian theories. Since then, Dr. Basu became an ardent Bayesian and, in many of his foundation papers, pointed out the deficiencies of both the Neyman–Pearsonian and the Fisherian methods.<ref name="projecteuclid" /> </blockquote>

After 1968, Basu began writing polemical essays, which provided paradoxes to frequentist statistics, and which produced great discussion in statistical journals and at statistical meetings. Particularly stimulating papers were Basu's papers on the foundations of survey sampling.<ref>Ghosh's editorial notes.</ref> There is an extensive literature discussing Basu's problem of estimating the weight of the elephants at a circus with an enormous bull elephant named Jumbo, which Basu used to illustrate his objections to the [[Horvitz–Thompson estimator]]<ref>{{cite book|first=Ken |last=Brewer| title=Combined Survey Sampling Inference: Weighing of Basu's Elephants| publisher=Hodder Arnold|year= 2002|isbn=978-0-340-69229-5}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal| last=Pavía|first=Jose M.|title=Estimating proportions with unequal sampling probabilities: the Basu's elephant problem revisited| journal=Far East J. Theor. Stat.| volume=29|year=2009|issue=2|pages=129–136}}</ref> and to Fisher's [[randomisation test]].<ref>{{cite book| last=Kempthorne|first=Oscar| author-link=Oscar Kempthorne |chapter=Intervention experiments, randomization and inference|title=Current Issues in Statistical Inference—Essays in Honor of D. Basu | editor=Malay Ghosh |editor2=Pramod K. Pathak | pages=13–31 | publisher=Institute for Mathematical Statistics |location=Hayward, CA | chapter-url=http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.lnms/1215458836 | doi=10.1214/lnms/1215458836 | mr=1194407|series=Institute of Mathematical Statistics Lecture Notes - Monograph Series|year=1992|isbn=0-940600-24-2}}</ref>

Basu taught at the [[Indian Statistical Institute]] and various universities around the world. He moved to the United States and taught statistics at [[Florida State University]] from 1975 to 1990 when he was made an emeritus professor; he has supervised six PhD students.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=48981
|title=Mathematical Genealogy
|author=
|access-date=4 March 2008
}}</ref> In 1979 he was elected as a [[Fellow of the American Statistical Association]].<ref>[http://www.amstat.org/awards/fellowslist.cfm View/Search Fellows of the ASA], accessed 2016-08-20.</ref>

==Publications==
Basu's main articles are reprinted with his comments in {{cite book|first=D.|last=Basu|title=Statistical information and likelihood : A collection of critical essays by Dr. D. Basu|editor=J.K. Ghosh|publisher=Springer|year=1988| series=Lecture Notes in Statistics | volume=45 | isbn=0-387-96751-6|mr=953081}} Also {{cite journal |doi=10.2307/2287648 |title=Randomization Analysis of Experimental Data: The Fisher Randomization Test |first=D. |last=Basu |authorlink5=Debabrata Basu |journal=Journal of the American Statistical Association |volume=75 |issue=371 |date=September 1980 |pages=575–582 | mr=590687 | jstor = 2287648}}

==References==
{{Reflist|30em}}

==Further reading==
* {{cite journal| title=Special issue in memory of D. Basu| journal=Sankhyā Ser. A| volume=64| year=2002|issue=3 (part 1 & 2) |publisher=Indian Statistical Institute | location=Calcutta | pages=vi–xiv+509–739, 741–899 | url=http://sankhya.isical.ac.in/pdfs/64a3/64A3cont.html| mr=1985395}}

==External links==
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20030414043231/http://stat.fsu.edu/newsletter/Fall2001.pdf Department of Statistics Florida State University]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20050129192627/http://www.fsu.edu/~fstime/FS-Times/Volume7/nov01web/17nov01.html ''Florida State Times'' obituary]
*[http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/people/basu.gif Debabrata Basu: another photograph] on the [http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/people/welcome.htm Portraits of Statisticians] page.
* For Basu's PhD students see {{MathGenealogy|id=48981}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Basu, Debabrata}}
[[Category:Survey methodologists]]
[[Category:Indian statisticians]]
[[Category:American statisticians]]
[[Category:20th-century Indian mathematicians]]
[[Category:Bengali mathematicians]]
[[Category:Florida State University faculty]]
[[Category:1924 births]]
[[Category:2001 deaths]]
[[Category:People from Dhaka District]]
[[Category:University of Dhaka alumni]]
[[Category:University of Calcutta alumni]]
[[Category:University of Dhaka faculty]]
[[Category:Indian Statistical Institute alumni]]
[[Category:Indian Statistical Institute faculty]]
[[Category:Fellows of the American Statistical Association]]

Debabrata Basu - Revision history

>Citation bot at 02:11, 20 March 2021