Joseph Berkson

Who was Joseph Berkson?

Joseph Berkson was trained as a physicist, physician, and statistician. In 1950, as Head of the Division of Biometry and Medical Statistics of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, Berkson wrote a key paper entitled Are there two regressions?. In this paper Berkson proposed an error model for regression analysis that contradicted the classical error model until that point assumed to generally apply and this has since been termed the Berkson error model. Whereas the classical error model is statistically independent of the true variable, Berkson's model is statistically independent of the observed variable. Carroll et al. refer to the two types of error models as follows:

error models including the Classical Measurement Error models and Error Calibration Models, where the conditional distribution of W given is modeled — use of such a model is appropriate when attempting to determine X directly, but this is prevented by various errors in measurement.

regression calibration models, where the conditional distribution of X given is modeled.