Nicholas Polson (born 7 May 1963) is a British statistician who is a professor of econometrics and statistics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His works are primarily in Bayesian statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo and Sequential Monte Carlo, (aka Particle filter). Polson was educated at Worcester College, Oxford, and the University of Nottingham, where his PhD supervisor was Adrian Smith.
Polson is the co-author (with James Scott) of the book AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together (2018), about the key ideas that played a role in the historical development of artificial intelligence.
Concerns have been raised about the originality of his recent writing products, as he approaches 300 papers posted in Social Science Research Network for 2026. These have now been removed by SSRN.
