Jerome Cornfield (original) (raw)

Jerome Cornfield (1912–1979) was an American statistician. He is best known for his work in biostatistics, but his early work was in economic statistics and he was also an early contributor to the theory of Bayesian inference. He played a role in the early development of input-output analysis and linear programming. Cornfield played a crucial role in establishing the causal link between smoking and incidence of lung cancer.He introduced the Rare disease assumption and the "Cornfield condition" that allows one to assess whether an unmeasured (binary) confounder can explain away the observed relative risk due to some exposure like smoking.