Nicola G. "Nicky" Best is a statistician known for her work on the deviance information criterion in Bayesian inference[B][E] and as a developer of Bayesian inference using Gibbs sampling.[1][A][D] She is a former professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at Imperial College London and is currently a biostatistician for GlaxoSmithKline.[2]
Education and career
Best earned a master's degree in medical statistics from the University of Leicester in 1990[2] and then a PhD in biostatistics from the University of Cambridge, supervised by David Spiegelhalter.[3] She joined the Imperial College faculty in 1996.[1] She moved from Imperial to GlaxoSmithKline in 2014.[2]
She was editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), from 2001 to 2004.[4]
Recognition
Best won the Guy Medal in Bronze of the Royal Statistical Society in 2004.[5] In 2018, she won the Bradford Hill Medal of the Royal Statistical Society "for her exquisite expositions of Bayesian methods through BUGS software, workshops, lectures, prior elicitations, textbooks and peer-review publications; and for substantive applications ranging from clinical trials and cost-effectiveness to epidemiology and, most recently, the optimization of pharmaceutical research programmes".[6] She was the 2025 recipient of the Greenfield Industrial Medal of the Royal Statistical Society for her work "co-developing the WinBUGS software and leading methodological innovation and data science solutions to improve the efficiency of clinical trials".[7]
Selected publications
| A. | David J. Lunn; Andrew Thomas; Nicky Best; David J. Spiegalhalter (2000), "WinBUGS - A Bayesian modelling framework: Concepts, structure, and extensibility", Statistics and Computing, 10 (4): 325–337, doi:10.1023/A:1008929526011, ISSN 0960-3174, Wikidata Q108929102 |
| B. | David J. Spiegelhalter; Nicola G. Best; Bradley P. Carlin; Angelika van der Linde (October 2002), "Bayesian measures of model complexity and fit", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 64 (4): 583–639, doi:10.1111/1467-9868.00353, ISSN 1369-7412, Zbl 1067.62010, Wikidata Q56532420 |
| C. | Martyn Plummer; Nicky Best; Kate Cowles; Karen Vines (2006), "CODA: convergence diagnosis and output analysis for MCMC", Rnews, 6 (1): 7, Wikidata Q108929147 |
| D. | David Lunn; David Spiegelhalter; Andrew Thomas; Nicky Best (10 November 2009), "The BUGS project: Evolution, critique and future directions", Statistics in Medicine, 28 (25): 3049–67, doi:10.1002/SIM.3680, ISSN 0277-6715, PMID 19630097, Wikidata Q28252857 |
| E. | David J. Spiegelhalter; Nicola G. Best; Bradley P. Carlin; Angelika van der Linde (8 April 2014), "The deviance information criterion: 12 years on", Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology, 76 (3): 485–493, doi:10.1111/RSSB.12062, ISSN 1369-7412, Zbl 1411.62027, Wikidata Q108929214 |
References
- 1 2 "Nicky Best", Speaker biographies, ESF 2014, retrieved 2019-09-13
- 1 2 3 "Professor Nicky Best", Industry and innovation case studies, The Royal Society, retrieved 2019-09-13
- ↑ "Curriculum vitae" (PDF), Understanding Uncertainty, retrieved 2019-05-10
- ↑ Professor Nicky Best: Honours and Memberships, Imperial College London, retrieved 2019-09-13
- ↑ "Royal Statistical Society Guy Medal in Bronze", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews, retrieved 2019-09-13
- ↑ "RSS announces recipients of 2018 honours", StatsLife, Royal Statistical Society, 22 January 2018, retrieved 2019-09-13
- ↑ Announcing our Honours recipients and Honorary Fellows for 2025, Royal Statistical Society, 3 April 2025, retrieved 2025-12-29
External links
- Nicky Best publications indexed by Google Scholar
