RICHARD A. OLSHEN

Telephone: 650-725-2241; 650-725-8666
Fax: 650-725-8977
E-mail: olshen@stat.stanford.edu

Education:
My interests regarding research are in statistics and mathematics and their applications to medicine and biology. Many efforts have concerned binary tree-structured algorithms for classification, regression, survival analysis, and clustering. Those for classification and survival analysis have been used with success in computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis, especially in cardiology, oncology, and toxicology. With Leo Breiman, Jerome Friedman (of Stanford), and Charles Stone I coauthored the book Classification and Regression Trees, in which motivation, algorithms, various examples, and mathematical theory for some tree-structured algorithms are given. The approaches to tree-structured clustering have been applied to lossy data compression, especially in digital radiography (with Robert Gray of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and others), and also to HIV genetics. More recent work on tree-structured methods concerns the development of an improvement of CARTR called FlexTree (with former Ph.D. student Jing Huang and others). It has found successful application to finding genotypes, their interactions with each other and with other variables, that predispose to hypertension in an Asian - Pacific Island population. Related research concerns finding genotypes and various interactions that are predictive of (a subset of) cardiovascular disease.

Much of my work concerns analyses of longitudinal data. Some research that was of interest concerned the pharmacokinetics of intracavitary chemotherapy with systemic rescue (with Stephen Howell of UCSD and others). Related efforts have also been applied to understanding the development of mature walking, longitudinal studies of cholesterol, and many aspects of glomerular filtration in patients with nephrotic disorders. With David Sutherland, Edmund Biden, and Marilynn Wyatt I coauthored The Development of Mature Walking.

I was one of the founders of what was first the NCI-designated UCSD Clinical Cancer Center, but is now the (Comprehensive) Rebecca and John Moores UCSD Cancer Center. Finally, for six years I was a Statistical Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

  • Professional Experience
  • Selected Publications
  • Manuscripts
  • FlexTree
  • HRP/STAT 262 (Spring quarter 2001)
  • HRP/STAT 261 (Winter quarter 2003)
  • Stat 49N (Spring 2004)