Lably
Skip to content

Evelyn Fix

Statistician

  • 1 min read
  • 1 chapter

Related on Lably

Through Statistics, Machine learning and K-nearest neighbors algorithm

LabStatisticsLabStatisticsLabStatisticsLabStatistics

During World War II, Fix worked as a research assistant in the Mathematics Department at the University of California, Berkeley on projects conducted as part of work conducted for the "Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee." Fix was one of two women who were the first assistant professors hired by the statistics group within the Mathematics Department in 1951. Statistics became a separate department in 1955. In 1951 Fix and Joseph Hodges, Jr. published their groundbreaking paper "Discriminatory Analysis. Nonparametric Discrimination: Consistency Properties," which defined the nearest neighbor rule, an important method that would go on to become a key piece of machine learning technologies, the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) algorithm.

She was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Personal life

In her latter years, Fix was the life partner of famous English statistician F.N. David who worked at the same department. They lived together in Kensington outside Berkeley.

More in Statistics

Mortality rateDeaths per 1,000 individuals per yearSystematic reviewComprehensive review of research literature using systematic methodsSensitivity and specificityStatistical measure of a binary classificationLongitudinal studyStudy with repeated observations over timePrevalenceNumber of disease cases in a given population at a specific timeStochasticRandomly determined process