David Hand

David John Hand (born 30 June 1950 in Peterborough) is a British statistician. His research interests include multivariate statistics, classification methods, pattern recognition, computational statistics and the foundations of statistics. He has written technical books on statistics, data mining, finance, classification methods, and measuring wellbeing, as well as science popularisation books including The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day; for research supervised by .

Books Hand has published 31 books, inter alia: 2001. Principles of Data Mining 2007. Measurement Theory and Practice: the World Through Quantification 2014. (with Paul Allin). The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive and Measurement. Wiley. 2014. The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles and Rare Events Happen All the Time 2020. From GDP to Sustainable Wellbeing: Changing Statistics or Changing Lives? 2020. Dark Data: Why What You Don't Know Matters

Articles Hand has published over 300 scientific articles, inter alia:

Hand D.J. and Henley W.E. (1997) Statistical classification methods in consumer credit scoring: a review. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 160, 523-541 Hand D.J., Blunt G., Kelly M.G., and Adams N.M. (2000) Data mining for fun and profit. Statistical Science, 15, 111-131 Hand D.J. and Yu K. (2001) Idiot's Bayes - not so stupid after all? International Statistical Review, 69, 385-398 Bolton R.J. and Hand D.J. (2002) Statistical fraud detection: a review. Statistical Science, 17, 235-255 Hand D.J. (2006) Classifier technology and the illusion of progress (with discussion). Statistical Science, 21, 1-34 2008. Top 10 algorithms in data mining Hand D.J. (2009) Measuring classifier performance: a coherent alternative to the area under the ROC curve. Machine Learning, 77, 103-123 Hand D.J. (2018) Statistical challenges of administrative and transaction data (with discussion). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 181, 555-605

Awards and honours Hand has received various awards for his work, including being elected Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries in 1999, the Guy Medal in Silver of the Royal Statistical Society in 2002, the IEEE ICDM Outstanding Contributions Award in 2004, the Credit Collections and Risk Award for Contributions to the Credit Industry in 2012, the George Box Medal for Business and Industrial Statistics in 2016, and the International Federation of Classification Societies Research Medal in 2019. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to research and innovation. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2003. and served on the European Statistical Advisory Committee, advising the European Commission from 2016 to 2021. He chaired the Administrative Data Research Network from 2014 to 2017 and has served on many other advisory committees, including chairing the Advisory Board of the ONS's Centre for Applied Data Ethics and the National Statistician's Expert User Advisory Committee.