William Swain Cleveland II (born 1943) is an American computer scientist and retired professor of statistics and retired professor of computer science atPurdue University, known for his work ondata visualization, particularly onnonparametric regression^[1] andlocal regression.^[2] He is one of the developers of theS programming language.^[3]

Cleveland obtained his AB in Mathematics mid 1960s from Princeton University, where he graduated underWilliam Feller. For his PhD studies in statistics he moved to Yale University, where he graduated in 1969 underLeonard Jimmie Savage.^[4][5]

After graduation Cleveland started atBell Labs, where he was staff member of the Statistics Research Department and department head for 12 years. While at Bell Labs, he helped to develop theS programming language, a precursor toR.^[3] Eventually he moved to the Purdue University, where he became Professor of Statistics and Courtesy Professor of Computer Science.

His research interests are in the fields of "data visualization, computer networking,machine learning,data mining, time series, statistical modeling, visual perception, environmental science, and seasonal adjustment."^[6] Cleveland is credited with defining and naming the field ofdata science, which he did in a 2001 publication.^[7]

Cleveland retired in 2025.^[8]

Cleveland received theWilcoxon Award fromTechnometrics in 1975 and 1977. He received the Youden Prize fromTechnometrics in 1987 along with Richard A. Becker at Bell Labs for their paperBrushing scatterplots.^[9]

In 1982 he was elected as aFellow of the American Statistical Association.^[10]

He was named the National Statistician of the Year, Chicago chapter of theAmerican Statistical Association in 1996. In 2016, Cleveland received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Graphics and Computing from theAmerican Statistical Association, and theParzen Prize for Statistical Innovation fromTexas A&M University. In 2021, he was awarded an honorary doctorate byHasselt University.^[11]

• Cleveland, William S.The elements of graphing data. Monterey, CA: Wadsworth Advanced Books and Software, 1985.
• Cleveland, William S.; McGill, Marylyn E. (1988).Dynamic graphics for statistics. The Wadsworth & Brooks-Cole statistics-probability series. Belmont, Calif: Wadsworth.ISBN 978-0-534-09144-6.
• Cleveland, William S.Visualizing data. Hobart Press, 1993.

• Cleveland, William S. "Robust locally weighted regression and smoothing scatterplots." Journal of the American statistical association 74.368 (1979): 829–836.
• Cleveland, William S., and Robert McGill. "Graphical perception: Theory, experimentation, and application to the development of graphical methods."Journal of the American statistical association 79.387 (1984): 531–554.
• Cleveland, William S., andSusan J. Devlin. "Locally weighted regression: an approach to regression analysis by local fitting." Journal of the American Statistical Association 83.403 (1988): 596–610.
• Cleveland, William S., Eric Grosse, and William M. Shyu. "Local regression models." Statistical models in S (1992): 309–376.

• William S. Cleveland, Shanti S. Gupta Professor of Statistics, Courtesy Professor of Computer Science

• 1943 births
• Living people
• Human–computer interaction researchers
• Data and information visualization experts
• Princeton University alumni
• Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
• Purdue University faculty
• Fellows of the American Statistical Association
• Scientists at Bell Labs

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