Past, Present, and Future of Statistics

Statistics is generally considered new as a subject, but it has been in existence for
the last six thousand years. It gets its origination from the society and initially had
been in use explaining problems from political and social sciences and genetics.
Ancient Statistics dealt with collection, summarization and presentation of data.
From the beginning of the twentieth century Statistics has experienced growing
applications of probability and mathematical modeling and has become a subject of
decision maing and forecasting in the face of uncertainty. !ecause of its hea"y
reliance on mathematics, Statistics was mistaenly considered as a part of
mathematics. #he de"elopment of Statistics taes a dramatic turn half a century
ago with the de"elopment of high$speed computers and software. %omputational
power has freed Statistics from the grip of mathematicians. #his is the time since
when Statistics has become the science of learning from data. In the last two
decades statistics has seen such a huge de"elopment with the aid of computer and
statistical software that was simply unthinable before. For the moment, the big
challenge of statistics is the handling of &big data'. It should be noted that the scale
of what is considered big data has been increasing steadily. (ilobytes )*+,-.,
megabytes )*+,/., gigabytes )*+,0., and terabytes )*+,*1. by now are familiar to
any researcher using modern computer resources. 2e are already recei"ing data in
a scale of petabytes )*+,*3. and exabytes )*+,*4.. #he issue with big data is that
while computing power doubles e"ery *4 months )5oore's 6aw. and I78
bandwidth increases about *+9 e"ery year, the amount of data doubles e"ery year.
5any statisticians belie"e that data re"olution is just getting started. It is
concei"able that data collection methods in the near future will generate data sets
of the scale of zettabytes )*+,1*. and yottabytes )*+,1:.. #his is indeed a big
challenge to statisticians but at the same time, the emergence of data science is also
presenting statisticians with extraordinary opportunities for increasing the impact
of the field in the real world. #his is the information age, statistics is the prime
information science, and there is e"ery reason to belie"e in a grately increased
statistical presence in the academy of future.