Joseph Hilbe

Joseph Michael Hilbe (December 30, 1944 – March 12, 2017) was an American statistician and philosopher, founding President of the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA) and one of the most prolific authors of books on statistical modeling in the early twenty-first century. Hilbe was an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), for which he founded the ISI astrostatistics committee in 2009. Hilbe was also a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and Full Member of the American Astronomical Society.

Hilbe made a number of contributions to the fields of count response models and logistic regression. Among his most influential books are two editions of Negative Binomial Regression (Cambridge University Press, 2007, 2011), Modeling Count Data (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Logistic Regression Models (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009). Modeling Count Data won the 2015 PROSE honorable mention award for books in mathematics as the second best mathematics book published in 2014. Hilbe was also editor-in-chief of the Springer Series in Astrostatistics, which began in 2011, was one of two co-editors for the Astrostatistics and AstroInformatics Portal, a co-ordinated website for the major astrostatistical organizations worldwide, hosted by the Pennsylvania State University Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and was coordinating editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Predictive Analytics in Action, which commenced in 2012. A listing of his books, book chapters and encyclopedia articles are listed below (Publications).

Hilbe was also a two-time national champion track & field athlete, a US team and NCAA Division 1 head coach, and Olympic Games official. He was also chair of the ISI sports statistics committee from 2007 to 2011 and chair of the 2014 Section on Statistics and Sports of the American Statistical Association.

Life and works Born in Los Angeles, California, son of Rader John Hilbe (1910–1980) and Nadyne Anderson Hilbe (1910–1988), Hilbe was raised in Arcadia, California, attended three years of high school at Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, California, before graduating from Paradise, California high school in 1962. Hilbe attended California State University, Chico, from which he graduated in 1968 with a degree in philosophy. Hilbe studied for his doctorate in philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he was a graduate reader for visiting professor and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek and personal assistant to Rudolf Carnap, one of the founders of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivism. for which he developed a variety of statistical software commands, including the first generalized linear model (GLM) program having a negative binomial regression family (1993). The negative binomial family is now incorporated into the GLM routines of all major commercial statistical software. Hilbe is regarded as having popularized negative binomial regression, particularly in the disciplines of biostatistics and health outcomes analysis. It is now a standard method used for modeling overdispersed count data. Hilbe's 2007 text, Negative Binomial Regression, was the first text specifically devoted to the model and its many variations. His 2014 Modeling Count Data is regarded as the first text on applied count models.

In 1992 Hilbe was appointed as an adjunct professor of Statistics in the Department of Sociology at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. In 2007 the Sociology department merged with several other departments to become the School of Social and Family Dynamics. Hilbe served in several corporate positions during the 1990s, including the positions of lead statistician for Genentech's National Registry for Myocardial Infarctions (NRMI-2;1996–97) and lead statistician for Hoffman-La Roche's Canadian National Registry for Cardiovascular Disease (FASTRAK;1997–99). During this period Hilbe played an important role in the formation of the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association, serving as a member of its initial executive committee and as a member of the founding scientific organizing committee (1995) for the International Conferences on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS).

Hilbe's long-term interest in astronomy and meteorites led to his selection in 2006 as a Solar System Ambassador with NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California commencing January 2007. In 2008 Hilbe initiated the International Statistical Institute's (ISI) Astrostatistics Interest Group. In December 2009, the ISI Council approved the creation of an astrostatistics committee and network with Hilbe as inaugural chair. In 2012, the Network and IAA stimulated the creation of the first working groups in astrostatistics and astroinformations within both the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and International Astronomical Union (IAU), with Hilbe as an initial member in both. Hilbe was also on the scientific organizing committee of the first IAU symposium on astrostatistics, Statistical Challenges in 21st Century Cosmology, held in May 2013 in Lisbon.

In 2009 Hilbe received the Distinguished Alumnus award from California State University, Chico. Two years prior, he had been inducted into the Chico State Athletic Hall of Fame. He is the only graduate of the university to receive both awards. In 2010, Hilbe was inducted into the Paradise High School Athletic Hall of Fame, and in 2011 was inducted into the Woodside Priory High School Athletic Hall of Fame. Hilbe was married to Cheryl Swisher (1984) in Honolulu, Hawaii, and has four children. Hilbe, Joseph M., Modeling Count Data, StatProb: The Encyclopedia Sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies (2010). Hilbe, Joseph M., Generalized Linear Models, StatProb: The Encyclopedia Sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies (2010). Hilbe, Joseph M., Logistic Regression in M. Lovric (editor), International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, New York: Springer (2010). Hilbe, Joseph M., Modeling Count Data in M. Lovric (editor), International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, New York: Springer (2010). Hilbe, Joseph M., Generalized Linear Models in M. Lovric (editor), International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, New York: Springer (2010). Hilbe, Joseph M, Statistical Software for the Social Sciences, in Kolenikov, S., L A. Thombs, and D. Steinley, (Eds), Statistics in the Social Sciences: Current Methodological Developments, Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. pages 175–189.(2010) Hilbe, J.M., G. Miner, and R. Nisbet, Astro-Statistics: Data Mining of SkyLab Project: Hubble Telescope Star and Galaxy Data, Tutorial SS, in Nisbet, R, J. Elder, and G. Miner (Eds), Handbook of Statistical Analysis & Data Mining Applications, New York:Elsevier (2009), Hilbe, J.M. and J.W. Hardin, Generalized Estimating Equations for Longitudinal Panel Analysis in S. Menard (Editor), Handbook of Longitudinal Research: Design, Measurement, and Analysis across the Social Sciences, London, UK: Academic Press/Elsevier (2007). Hilbe, Joseph and William Greene, Count Response Regression Models, in C.R. Rao, J.P. Miller, and D.C.Rao (Editors), Handbook of Statistics, Vol 27: Epidemiology and Medical Statistics, London, UK: North Holland/Elsevier (2007). Holmes, J.D., J. Rohn, and J. Hilbe, Informatics and Software Applications for Data Analyses in Van Beneden, C. and N. Mikanatha, (editors), Infectious Disease Surveillance, London: Blackwell (2007). Hardin, J.W. and J.M. Hilbe (2007). "Generalized Estimating Equations" in Encyclopedia of Clinical Trials, New York: Wiley & Son Pub. Hilbe, Joseph M., The Coevolution of Statistics and Hz. In S. Sawilowsky (ed.),Real Data Analysis, American Educational Research Association, SIG/Educational Statisticians: Information Age Publishing (2006). Hamilton, L. and J. Hilbe Statistical Analysis Using Stata, in R. Stine & J. Fox (Editors), Statistical Computing Environments for Social Research, Sage Publishing Co. (1997). Hilbe, J. and B. Turlach, Generalized Linear Models, in W. Haerdle, S. Klinke, B Turlach (Editors), XploRe: An interactive Statistical Computing Environment, Springer-Verlag (1995).