David Firth

David Firth (born 22 December 1957) is a British statistician. He is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick. Education Firth was born and went to school in Wakefield. He studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD in Statistics at Imperial College London, supervised by Sir David Cox. Research Firth is known for his development of a general method for reducing the bias of maximum likelihood estimation in parametric statistical models. The method has seen application in a wide variety of research fields, especially with logistic regression analysis where the reduced-bias estimates also have reduced variance and are always finite; the latter property overcomes the frequently encountered problem of separation, which causes maximum likelihood estimates to be infinite. The original paper published in 1993 has been cited more than 4000 times according to Google Scholar.