Strong Development of Statistics Encouraged by Competition and Co-Creation with Adjacent Fields

Abstract

In 2012, at the ILSVRC, an international contest for object recognition accuracy, the University of Toronto team showed an unparalleled recognition rate with an error rate of just under 17% using deep learning, while other teams had an error rate of around 26%. It was also in 2012 that the Obama administration announced its strategic plan for big data research and development (commonly known as the Big Data Initiative). Therefore, we can say that 2012 was the starting point of the third AI boom. Today, only 10 years have passed since then. In particular, the remarkable development of data analysis methods over the past few years has had the biggest impact on me, as I have been involved in statistical data analysis since I was a student. In this paper, I will review the development of statistics over the past 40 years from my point of view, as I have been involved in research in statistics and related fields since the 1980s. I hope that this paper will be of some help in considering future trends in statistics.