Overview
Thomas S. Ferguson is a statistician (Professor Emeritus, UCLA) known for foundational work in mathematical statistics, decision theory, and Bayesian nonparametrics — above all the introduction of the Dirichlet process.
Key Contributions / Features
- Dirichlet process (Ferguson 1973): introduced the Dirichlet process as a prior over probability measures, showing its posterior after sampling is again a Dirichlet process — the founding object of Bayesian nonparametrics. Annals of Statistics 1(2): 209–230.
- Prior distributions on spaces of probability measures (Ferguson 1974): further theory for nonparametric priors. Annals of Statistics 2(4): 615–629.
- Mathematical Statistics: A Decision Theoretic Approach (1967): a standard text.
- Extended by Antoniak (1974) to mixtures of Dirichlet processes.
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