This volume is a collection of papers presented at a conference held in
Shoresh Holiday Resort near Jerusalem, Israel, in December 2000
organized by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport. The
theme of the conference was "Foundation of Statistical Inference:
Applications in the Medical and Social Sciences and in Industry and the
Interface of Computer Sciences". The following is a quotation from the
Program and Abstract booklet of the conference. "Over the past several
decades, the field of statistics has seen tremendous growth and
development in theory and methodology. At the same time, the advent of
computers has facilitated the use of modern statistics in all branches
of science, making statistics even more interdisciplinary than in the
past; statistics, thus, has become strongly rooted in all empirical
research in the medical, social, and engineering sciences. The abundance
of computer programs and the variety of methods available to users
brought to light the critical issues of choosing models and, given a
data set, the methods most suitable for its analysis. Mathematical
statisticians have devoted a great deal of effort to studying the
appropriateness of models for various types of data, and defining the
conditions under which a particular method work. " In 1985 an
international conference with a similar title* was held in Is- rael. It
provided a platform for a formal debate between the two main schools of
thought in Statistics, the Bayesian, and the Frequentists.