The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The Institute has about 4,000 elected members from government, academia, and the private sector. The affiliated Associations have membership open to any professional statistician. The Institute publishes a variety of books and journals, and holds an international conference every two years. The biennial convention was commonly known as the ISI Session; however, since 2011, it is now referred to as the ISI World Statistics Congress. The permanent office of the Institute is located in the Statistics Netherlands building in Den Haag - Leidschenveen (The Hague), in the Netherlands.
ISI serves as an umbrella for seven specialized Associations:
ISI Committees fall under one of three categories: operational, special interest, and outreach.
Current Special Interest Groups are:
The organization has had thirty-three presidents.
ISI publishes the following journals:
The Karl Pearson Prize was commenced by the ISI in 2013 to acknowledge contributions, which must be a research article or book published within the last three decades, on statistical theory, methodology, practice, or applications. The prize was named after English statistician Karl Pearson. It is bestowed biennially at the ISI World Statistics Congress. The winner of the prize receives 5,000 euros and gives the Karl Pearson Lecture.
Peter McCullagh and John Nelder were the winners of the inaugural Karl Pearson Prize "for their monograph Generalized Linear Models (1983)".