Leo Breiman

Leo Breiman (January 27 1928 – July 7 2005) was a distinguished statistician at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and was a member of the United States National Academy of Science.

Breiman's work bridged the gap between statisticians and computer scientists, particularly in the field of machine learning. Perhaps his most important contributions were his work on classification and regression trees and ensembles of trees fit to bootstrap samples. Bootstrap aggregation was given the name bagging by Breiman. Another of Breiman's ensemble approaches is the random forest.