Scientific and technological journalist Chen Yoy

On the evening of October 9, Beijing time, the 2025 World Statistical Conference was held in The Hague, the Netherlands, where Zhou Huang, Professor of Statistics at the University of Minnesota, and Trevor Hastie, Professor at Stanford University, jointly won the 2025 Statistics Founding Prize.

The Statistics Founding Prize is one of the highest awards of the International Statistical Society (ISI) and is designed to recognize research achievements that have a profound impact on statistical theory, methods, practices or applications.

The main reason why Zhou won the prize was because he and Professor Hastie published a 2005 article in the Royal Society of Statistics, titled Normalization and Variable Selection through Flexible Networks, which was quoted more than 23,000 times.This is also one of the five most quoted papers since the Royal Society of Statistics was founded.

Zou Hui introduced that elastic networks take into account three goals: good prediction performance, effective variable screening and low computational complexity, providing an efficient solution for high-dimensional data regression modeling. Users can quickly obtain a statistical model with high prediction accuracy and good interpretation for various complex data modeling and analysis. At present, this method has been widely used in high-dimensional data analysis.