Leo Breiman

Leo Breiman
Leo Breiman in 2003
Born(1928-01-27)January 27, 1928
DiedJuly 5, 2005(2005-07-05) (aged 77)
Alma materUniversity of California, Berkeley
Known forCART, Bagging, Random forest
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
ThesisHomogeneous Processes (1954)
Doctoral advisorMichel Loève
Doctoral studentsAdele Cutler

Leo Breiman (January 27, 1928 – July 5, 2005) was a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards,[citation needed] and was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Breiman's work helped to bridge the gap between statistics and computer science, particularly in the field of machine learning. His most important contributions were his work on classification and regression trees and ensembles of trees fit to bootstrap samples. Bootstrap aggregation was given the name bagging by Breiman. Another of Breiman's ensemble approaches is the random forest.