Google Doodle celebrates 90th birthday of Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike

New Delhi: Online search giant Google is celebrating the 90th birthday of Japanese Statistician Hirotugu Akaike's with a special doodle.

Google's Doodle portrays Dr Akaike against a Google-inspired approximation of functions, parameters, and their respective curves.

“If you've ever conducted a statistical analysis, you might’ve spent hours thinking about which variables to include and the impact each would have on the outcome. But to ensure the model itself is accurate, shouldn’t someone measure the measurers?” Google wrote.

Born on November 5, 1927 – August 4, 2009, Hirotsugu Akaike worked on information theory. In the early 1970s he formulated a criterion for model selection—the Akaike information criterion, which is now widely used.

“In the early 1950s, a young Japanese scientist named Hirotugu Akaike asked this simple but crucial question. More than two decades of research later, he presented the answer as a simple equation known as the Akaike Information Criterion. With AIC, analysts select a model from a set of options by measuring how close the results are to the (hypothetical) truth,” Google added.

This criterion established a new paradigm that bridged the world of data and the world of modeling, thus contributing greatly to the information and statistical sciences.