William E. Winkler Explained

William Erwin Winkler (November 11, 1946 – June 30, 2022) was an American statistician who spent most of his career at the U.S. Census Bureau. He is known for many contributions to the development of probabilistic methods for record linkage^{[1] [2]} and the invention of the Jaro-Winkler distance for strings.^{[3] [4] [5]}

Education and career

Winkler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and. He obtained his B.S. in mathematics at the Michigan State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in probability theory at the Ohio State University under the supervision of Louis Sucheston.^[6] During this period, Winkler worked on Markov chains. After graduation, Winkler became an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1974 to 1979. In 1980, Winkler joined the Energy Information Administration of the United States Department of Energy as a mathematical statistician and worked there until 1987, at which time he moved to the U.S. Census Bureau and rose to the rank of principal researcher.^[7] He led the Record Linkage and Machine Learning Research Group at the U.S. Census Bureau until 2019, when he retired. Winkler was an affiliate faculty member at the George Mason University since 2009.^[8]

Bibliography

• Book: Thomas N. . Herzog . Fritz J. . Scheuren . William E. . Winkler . Data Quality and Record Linkage Techniques . 2007 . Springer New York . 10.1007/0-387-69505-2 . 978-0-387-69502-0 . en.

Notes and References

1. Web site: William E. Winkler: A High-Impact Career in Statistical Computing - Yves Thibaudeau . Massive Data Institute . en . 15 August 2022.
2. Winkler . William E. . Matching and record linkage . WIREs Computational Statistics . September 2014 . 6 . 5 . 313–325 . 10.1002/wics.1317. 60467185 .
3. Cohen . William W. . Ravikumar . Pradeep . Fienberg . Stephen E. . A comparison of string distance metrics for name-matching tasks . Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Information Integration on the Web . 9 August 2003 . 73–78 . AAAI Press.
4. Dreßler . Kevin . Ngonga Ngomo . Axel-Cyrille . On the efficient execution of bounded Jaro-Winkler distances . Semantic Web . 6 December 2016 . 8 . 2 . 185–196 . 10.3233/SW-150209.
5. Web site: Winkler . William E. . String Comparator Metrics and Enhanced Decision Rules in the Fellegi-Sunter Model of Record Linkage . 1990 . en.
6. Web site: William Winkler - The Mathematics Genealogy Project . www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu.
7. Web site: Who Inspires You? Amstat News . 1 September 2015.
8. Web site: Obituaries for September 2022 Amstat News . 1 September 2022.