| William John Youden | |
| Birth Date: | 12 April 1900 |
| Birth Place: | Townsville, Australia |
| Death Place: | Washington, D.C. |
| Nationality: | American |
| Field: | Statistics |
| Work Institutions: | National Bureau of Standards Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research |
| Alma Mater: | University of Rochester |
William John Youden (April 12, 1900 - March 31, 1971) was an Australian-born American statistician who formulated new statistical techniques in statistical analysis and in design of experiments. He developed the "Youden square", an incomplete block design developed from a 1937 paper, "Use of Incomplete Block Replications in Estimating Tobacco Mosaic Virus". He also helped to introduce the concept of restricted randomization, which he called constrained randomization.[1] [2] [3] [4] He devised Youden's J statistic as a simple measure summarising the performance of a binary diagnostic test.[5]
In 1951, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[6] The American Statistical Association bestows the W. J. Youden Award in Interlaboratory Testing to authors "of publications that make outstanding contributions to the design and/or analysis of interlaboratory tests or describe ingenious approaches to the planning and evaluation of data from such tests." The award is presented each year at the Joint Statistical Meetings.[7]
In 1967, Youden served as president of the Philosophical Society of Washington, a science organization.[8]