Ronald A. Fisher

Formalized maximum likelihood and the design of experiments.

Biography

A British statistician and geneticist who built much of the framework of modern statistical inference while working on agricultural field trials. His work established how experiments should be designed so that their results support valid conclusions.

Key contributions

• Formalization of maximum likelihood estimation as a general method of inference.
• Analysis of variance, and the principles of randomization and replication in experimental design.
• Foundational contributions to statistical genetics.

Impact

Maximum likelihood is the estimation principle behind logistic regression and, through its equivalence with cross-entropy minimization, behind most supervised training of neural networks.