The Department of Statistics at Florida State University is pleased to announce that Robert Tibshirani, Professor of Statistics and Professor of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, is the 2025 Myles Hollander Distinguished Lecturer.

Tibshirani will present "Univariate-Guided Sparse Regression" at  3:30 pm, Friday, October 17th, 2025 in the Psychology Department Auditorium on the FSU main campus in Tallahassee.  The live talk will also be available via Zoom.

A celebration of the life and contributions of Myles Hollander will be held Saturday, October 18, 2025 on the FSU campus. For more information, please contact events@stat.fsu.edu.

Lecture Abstract

In this talk I introduce "UniLasso", a novel statistical method for sparse regression. This two-stage approach preserves the signs of the univariate coefficients and leverages their magnitude. Both of these properties are attractive for stability and interpretation of the model. Through comprehensive simulations and applications to real-world datasets, we demonstrate that UniLasso outperforms Lasso in various settings, particularly in terms of sparsity and model interpretability. We prove asymptotic support recovery and mean-squared error consistency under a set of conditions different from the well known irrepresentability conditions for the Lasso. Extensions to generalized linear models (GLMs) and Cox regression are also discussed. A special case of lasso, "uniReg" is an interesting competitor to good ol' least squares regression (Legendre, 1805).

This is joint work with Sourav Chatterjee and Trevor Hastie.

About the Speaker

Robert Tibshirani received a B.S. in statistics and computer science from the University of Waterloo (1979), M.S. in statistics from the University of Toronto (1980), and the Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford University (1984). He has maintained appointments in statistics and the biomedical sciences throughout his career, beginning with his first faculty appointment at the University of Toronto in 1985 in the Department of Statistics and in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biostatistics. He moved to Stanford University in 1998 and, in addition to his professorship in the Department of Statistics, was professor in the Departments of Public Health Sciences, Health Research and Policy, and, currently, Biomedical Data Science.

Tibshirani’s research contributions provide novel, effective methods that have significantly shaped modern statistical theory and practice. He introduced the Lasso (1996), which is fundamental in high dimensional statistics. He is co-author of five influential books, including Generalized Additive Models (1990), An Introduction to the Bootstrap (1993), and The Elements of Statistical Learning (2001). Recent awards include the COPSS Distinguished Achievement Award and Lectureship, the WNAR Outstanding Impact Award, and the ISI Founders Statistics Prize. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Society. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.

About Myles Hollander

Professor Emeritus Myles Hollander joined the FSU Department of Statistics in 1965 upon completion of his M.S. and Ph.D. in statistics at Stanford University after earning his B.S. in mathematics from Carnegie Institute of Technology. He made substantial and enduring research contributions to nonparametric statistics, reliability theory, survival analysis, biostatistics and probability theory, among other areas. Hollander co-authored textbooks on nonparametric statistics, biostatistics, and introductory statistics.

Hollander is Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He served as editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Theory and Methods (1994-1996) after being editor-elect (1993-1994). In 2003, the American Statistical Association recognized him with the Gottfried E. Noether Senior Scholar Award for his excellence in theory, methodology, and applications in nonparametric statistics.

At FSU, Hollander served as statistics chair for nine years (1978-1981, 1999-2005). He received the Professorial Excellence Award in 1977, was named Distinguished Research Professor in 1996, and in 1998 was named Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, the highest honor Florida State faculty bestow upon one of their own. He retired in 2007 after 42 years of service. He passed away in early 2025.

The Myles Hollander Distinguished Lectureship is sponsored by: