Beyond Parametrics in Interdisciplinary Research: Festschrift in Honor   of Professor Pranab K. Sen
  Pranab K. Sen has contributed extensively to many areas of Statistics including order statistics, nonparametrics, robust inference, sequential methods, asymptotics, biostatistics, clinical trials, bioenvironmental studies and bioinformatics. His long list of over 600 publications and 22 books and volumes along with numerous citations during the past 5 decades bear testimony to his work. All three of us have had the good fortune of being associated with him in different capacities. He has given professional and personal advice on many occasions to all of us, and we feel that our lives have certainly been enriched by our association with him. He has been over the years a friend, philosopher and a guide to us, and still continues to be one! While parametric statistical inference remains ever so popular, semi-parametric, Bayesian and nonparametric inferential methods have attracted great attention from numerous applied scientists because of their weaker assumptions, which make them naturally robust and so more appropriate in real-life applications. This clearly signals for ``beyond parametrics'' approaches which include nonparametrics, semi-parametrics, Bayes methods and many others. Motivated by this feature, and his drive in the ``beyond parametrics'' area, we thought that it will be only appropriate for a volume in honor of Pranab Kumar Sen to focus on this aspect of statistical inference and its applications. With this in mind, we have put together this volume in order to (i) review some of the recent developments in this direction, (ii) focus on some new methodologies and highlight their applications, and (iii) suggest some interesting open problems and possible new directions for further research. 
N. Balakrishnan, Edsel A. Pe\~na, Mervyn J. Silvapulle