Leo Breiman

Leo Breiman was an American statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, born on 27 January 1928 and died on 5 July 2005. His work helped bridge statistics and computer science, especially in machine learning. His most important contributions were classification and regression trees and ensembles of trees fit to bootstrap samples, and he coined the term bagging for the process of bootstrap aggregation. His paper on the random forest, published in 2001, is among the ten most-cited papers in machine learning. Breiman earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1949, a master's degree in mathematics from Columbia University in 1950 and a doctorate from Berkeley in 1954. He taught probability at the University of California, Los Angeles, resigned to publish the textbook Probability in 1968, and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1980, where he established the Statistical Computing Facility. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.