Adaptive statistical procedures and related topics : proceedings of a symposium in honor of Herbert Robbins, June 7-11, 1985, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York / John Van Ryzin

From the preface: "Herbert Robbins, Higgins Professor of mathematical statistics, Columbia University, and senior mathematician, Brookhaven National Laboratory, celebrated his 70th birthday on January 12, 1985. In honor of this occasion and to pay tribute to his pioneering and influential work in statistics and probability, a symposium was held at Brookhaven National Laboratory on June 7–11, 1985. The idea of the symposium, entitled `Adaptive statistical procedures and related topics', was to cover the broad range of topics in which Professor Robbins has made fundamental contributions. The term `adaptive' in the title was meant to capture the spirit of his work in the areas of stochastic approximation, empirical Bayes and sequential analysis. All these areas have the common feature that they adapt to approximate some ideal or optimal statistical procedure as observations accumulate in number and/or time. In addition to this a number of invited speakers, many of whom were or are students and/or colleagues of Professor Robbins, chose to speak on a related topic in probability or statistics. Those papers are also given in this volume.''