RICHARD A. OLSHEN

Telephone: 650-725-2241; 650-725-8666
Fax: 650-725-8977
E-mail: olshen@stanford.edu

Education:
  • Ph.D. 1966 (December) Yale University
  • M.S. 1965 Yale University
  • A.B. 1963 University of California, Berkeley
    (The major subject for all degrees was Statistics.)

My interests regarding research are in statistics and mathematics and their applications to medicine and biology. Many efforts have concerned binary tree-structured algorithms for classification, regression, survival analysis, and clustering. Those for classification and survival analysis have been used with success in computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis, especially in cardiology, oncology, and toxicology. With the late Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman (of Stanford), and Charles Stone (of the University of California, Berkeley) I coauthored the book Classification and Regression Trees, that gives motivation, algorithms, various examples, and mathematical theory for what have come to be known as CART algorithms. The approaches to tree-structured clustering have been applied to lossy data compression, especially in digital radiography (with Robert Gray of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and others), and also to HIV genetics. Recent research concerns applying information on SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and other features as together they predispose to hypertension in a population of white women.

Much of my work concerns analyses of longitudinal data. Some that was of interest concerned the pharmacokinetics of intracavitary chemotherapy with systemic rescue. Related efforts have also been to the development of mature walking, longitudinal studies of cholesterol, and many aspects of glomerular filtration in patients with nephrotic disorders. With the late David Sutherland, Edmund Biden, and Marilynn Wyatt I coauthored The Development of Mature Walking.

I was one of the founders of the NCI-designated UCSD Clinical Cancer Center, which is now the University of California, San Diego Medical Center Moores Cancer Center. For six years I was a Statistical Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some research has involved more mathematical problems, including those that arise concerning exchangeable probabilities, conditional levels of particular test statistics, topological category regarding CART-like estimators in regression, and successive standardization of rectangular arrays of numbers.

  • Professional Experience
  • Selected Publications
  • Manuscripts
  • FlexTree