---
title: "Allan M. Skene"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Allan M. Skene"
aliases: ["A. M. Skene"]
first_seen: "2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z"
connects_to: ["Dawid-Skene model","crowdsourcing label aggregation","EM algorithm","A. Philip Dawid"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Co-author, with A. Philip Dawid, of "Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Observer Error-Rates Using the EM Algorithm" (1979) — the paper, built around five anaesthetists' disagreeing fitness-for-surgery ratings, that later work named the Dawid-Skene model. Not separately researched by this vault beyond that co-authorship. Matters here as one half of the named origin of a real, traced citation lineage: the 1979 Dawid-Skene model is the explicit ancestor of Li & Yu (2014)'s crowdsourcing weighted-majority-voting method, which RA-RAG (2025) extends for LLM retrieval.

## References
- 2026-08-13: Co-creator of the 1979 confusion-matrix/EM model that Li & Yu (2014) name as crowdsourcing WMV's direct ancestor, itself extended by RA-RAG (2025). ([[claim-li-yu-2014-credits-dawid-skene-1979-as-wmv-ancestor]], [[claim-dawid-skene-1979-worked-example-is-anaesthetist-fitness-ratings]])