Statistics of Quality

Subir Ghosh, William R. Schucany, William B. Smith

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367401207
• eBook ISBN: 9781000148596
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Explains the role of statistics in improving the quality of collecting and analyzing information for a wide variety of applications. The book examines the function of statisticians in quality improvement. It discusses statistical process control, quality statistical tables, and quality and warranty; quality standards in medicine and public health; Taguchi robust designs and survival models; and more.

1

Donald B. Owen’s Contributions to the Statistics of Quality

William R. Schucany

Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Donald B. Owen. The editors and the publisher believe that it is especially appropriate to honor Don with this collection. He made many contributions to statistical theory and methodology. Many of these are at the foundation of quality control. Furthermore, Don’s research during his final years addressed the modern topics of process capability indices in quality improvement. The various topics in the quality area are clearly important ones. Don Owen’s work made a significant impact on them. Moreover, he loved this series of books.

Donald B. Owen was born January 24, 1922. Don was raised in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, where he attended the University of Washington, earning a B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics and in 1951 a Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics. It was there that he met Ellen. They married in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1952. Their daughter, Mary Ellen, was born in Lafayette, Indiana, while Don was Assistant Professor at Purdue University.

For ten years Don worked at Sandia in Albuquerque. While there he wrote several of his early papers on bivariate normality computations and sampling inspections, as well as publishing his classic Handbook of Statistical Tables. His sons David and Matthew were born during these years in New Mexico.

In 1964 the Owen family moved to Dallas, Texas, where their youngest son Mark was born. For two years Don was on the staff of the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, which has since become the University of Texas at Dallas. He then joined the Department of Statistics at Southern Methodist University and remained there for the rest of his career. Don succeeded Paul Minton, the department’s first chair at SMU, and very ably served in that capacity from 1972 to 1979.

Don Owen had a productive 25 years at SMU. Before becoming department chair, he offered his administrative skills to the broader statistical community. He was an associate editor for both JASA and Technometrics until 1972. He was a coeditor for the Selected Tables in Mathematical Statistics until 1977. Among other things he was director of the Visiting Lecturer Program in Statistics from 1971 to 1973. Don also organized and hosted a national symposium on the history of probability and statistics in celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial.

Any of Don’s colleagues will testify to his vigor and persistence. He was generous with his suggestions for research problems. His interest in his graduate students’ progress generally resulted in long-term helpful support. Twenty-four students wrote Ph.D. dissertations under Don’s direction from 1968 through 1988: Lowell D. Gregory, Dwane E. Anderson, A. E. Crofts, Jr., Frederick C. Durling, Guy Burton Seibert, Jr., Danny Dyer, Gibb M. Matlock, Ray Sansing, William R. Schucany, John C. Young, Satish Chandra, Jerrell T. Stracener, John W. Boddie, William L. Lester, Yueh-Ling Hsiao, Stephen L. Meeks, Roy Haas, Youn-Min Chou, Hon Yeh, Ling-Shua Chow, Jyh-Cherng Shyu, Salvador Borrego, Donald P. Strickert, and Huaixiang Li. Owen was keenly aware of academic lineage. With a mixture of modesty and some pride he would inform some of his own advisees that his dissertation was supervised by Professor Douglas Chapman, who was a student of Eric Lehmann, who worked for Jersey Neyman, whose postdoctoral advisor was Karl Pearson.

Don’s dedication to the profession can best be understood by recognizing that he spent his final days on teaching and editorial work. Even though he was too ill to teach in the fall semester, due to undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer that was diagnosed in August 1990, he taught his graduate-level quality control course in the Spring. He delivered the final lecture of the semester on Wednesday and was readmitted to the hospital on Thursday. Friday he took care of the usual pile of editorial correspondence. He passed away early on Sunday morning, May 5, 1991.

The research topics that interested Don were tabulation of statistical functions, tolerance limits, sampling plans, screening and quality control, and multivariate normality. At the end of his career, he was actively investigating new process capability indices in quality management. These many investigations over the years were the subjects of 8 books and more than 75 journal articles. Don’s research attracted good, steady levels of funding from government agencies. The Themis contract for which he was project director from 1968 to 1975 had a total budget of $1,000,000. The screening variables research was funded by the Office of Naval Research for more than 10 years for a total of more than $500,000.

Perhaps the activities that pleased him the most were the founding and nurturing of the series of books and journals for Marcel Dekker, Inc. The journal Communications in Statistics was first published under his editorship in 1973. It was conceived in a meeting with Dr. Maurits Dekker, Don, and two of the original associate editors, Henry L. Gray and myself. Professor Anant M. Kshrisagar has been a senior editorial member from the beginning. This internationally known periodical is one from which Don Owen drew great satisfaction. A large number of authors found that they had a sympathetic ally in this particular editor. It is noteworthy that in his final year the annual volume had about 5000 pages of technical articles. The responsibility of editor-in-chief passed to William B. Smith. At the time of Don’s death, the series Statistics: Textbooks and Monographs contained 119 volumes. Since that time, I have been editor of this series.

Some of the many acknowledgments that Don received for his professional activities include his being named Fellow of ASA (1964), AAAS (1965), IMS (1967), and ASQC (1989). Perhaps more than these, however, the honor bestowed upon him by the San Antonio chapter of ASA was one that meant the most to Don. The San Antonio chapter each year awards the Don Owen Award to an individual in the five-state region surrounding Texas who has made significant accomplishments in research, statistical consulting, and service to the statistical community. Beginning in 1983, Don and the awardee were honored at the annual banquet. The recipients have been Robert L. Mason, Carl N. Morris, William R. Schucany, James R. Thompson, W. J. Conover, Ronald R. Hocking, Ronald L. Iman, Patrick L. Odell, Emanuel Parzen, Richard F. Gunst, William B. Smith, David W. Scott, Raymond J. Carroll, Edmund A. Gehan, and Peter W. M. John. This ongoing, well-deserved tribute to him is funded by Marcel Dekker, Inc. His passing created a void in our department and in the international community of statistical scientists. However, his legacy is more evident with the passage of the years. His books and articles are listed here.

PUBLICATIONS OF DONALD B. OWEN

Books, Chapters, and Other Entries

Applications of the Tables, Tables of the Bivariate Normal Distribution Function and Related Functions, The National Bureau of Standards, Applied Mathematics Series, No. 50, June 15, 1959, pp. XVII–XLIV.

Tables of the Hypergeometric Probability Distribution (with G. J. Lieberman), Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1961.

Handbook of Statistical Tables, Addison-Wesley and Pergamon Press, London, 1962.

The availability of tables useful in analyzing linear models, A Survey of Statistical Design and Linear Models (with R. F. Gunst) ( J. N. Srivastava, ed.), North-Holland Publ. Co., 1975, pp. 181–196.

Handbook of Statistical Distributions (with J. K. Patel and C. H. Kapadia), Dekker, New York, 1976.

Pocketbook of Statistical Tables (with R. E. Odeh, L. Fisher, and Z. W. Birnbaum), Dekker, New York, 1977.

Tables of the normal conditioned on t-distribution (with R. Haas), Contributions to Survey Sampling and Applied Statistics ( H. A. David, ed.) Academic Press, New York, 1978.

Tables for Normal Tolerance Limits, Sampling Plans, and Screening (with R. E. Odeh), Dekker, New York, 1981.

Communications in Statistics, Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, Vol. II (Johnson, Kotz, and Read, eds.) Wiley, New York, 1992, pp. 60–62.

Attribute Sampling Plans, Tables of Tests and Confidence Limits for Proportions (with R. E. Odeh), Dekker, New York, 1983.

The noncentral t-distribution, Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, Vol. V (Johnson, Kotz, and Read, eds.), Wiley, New York: 1985, pp. 286–290.

Orthant probabilities, Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, Vol. VI, Wiley, New York, 1985, pp. 521–523.

Parts per Million Values for Estimating Quality Levels (with R. E. Odeh), Dekker, New York, 1988.

Screening by correlated variates, Encyclopedia of Statistical Science, Vol. VIII, Wiley, New York, 1988, pp. 309–312.

Beating Your Competition Through Quality, Dekker, New York, 1989.

Journal Articles

A property of integrals of the product of the Lagrange interpolating polynomials and the exponential function, Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science, 63: 261 (1953).

Book Review: Associated Measurements, by M. H. Quenouille, Scientific Monthly 7...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• 1. Donald B. Owen’s Contributions to the Statistics of Quality
• 2. The Quality Movement: Where It Stands and the Role of Statisticians in Its Future
• 3. A Sequential Test of Some Process Capability Indices
• 4. Calibration of Gasoline Flow Meters
• 5. Some Aspects of Hotelling’s T2 Statistic for Multivariate Quality Control
• 6. Magnetic Field Quality Investigations for Superconducting Super Collider Magnets
• 7. Real Experiments, Real Mistakes, Real Learning!
• 8. Taguchi’s Robust Design and Some Alternatives
• 9. Determining Optimum Settings of Explanatory Variables and Measuring Influence of Observations in Multiresponse Experiments
• 10. Developing Measurement for Experimentation
• 11. Lattice Squares
• 12. Marginally and Conditionally Specified Multivariate Survival Models: A Survey
• 13. Moments and Wavelets in Signal Estimation
• 14. Hierarchical Bayes Models in Contextual Spatial Classification
• 15. Asymmetry and Outlier Detection Using Correspondence Analysis
• 16. Concrete Statistics
• 17. Numerical Methods for Use in Preparing High-Quality Statistical Tables
• 18. Modeling Quality Standards with Decision Analysis in Medicine and Public Health
• 19. Quality and Warranty: Sensitivity of Warranty Cost Models to Distributional Assumptions
• 20. On Semiparametric Estimation of a Probability Density
• 21. Improving Survey Estimates Using Rotation Design Sampling
• 22. Multicriteria Optimization in Sampling Design
• Index