Grace Wahba awarded the 2025 International Prize in Statistics

The International Prize in Statistics Foundation has awarded Grace Wahba the 2025 prize for "her groundbreaking work on smoothing splines, which has transformed data analysis and machine learning". Professor Wahba was among the earliest to pioneer the use of nonparametric regression modeling. Recent advances in computing and availability of large data sets have further popularized these models, especially under the guise of machine learning algorithms such as gradient boosting and neural networks. Nevertheless, the use of smoothing splines remains a mainstay of nonparametric regression. In seminal research that began in the early 1970s, Wahba developed theoretical foundations and computational algorithms for fitting smoothing splines to noisy data.