In 2008 an authorized astrostatistics interest group was formed by Joseph Hilbe of Arizona State University under the scope of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), which is to statistics as the IAU is to astronomy. At the winter ISI executive board meeting in December of 2009, Astrostatistics became an ISI standing committee, the first such committee authorized by any astronomical or statistical organization or society. However, the ISI has member limits for committees, and we had far more interest in the committee than the limits allowed. In January 2010, some three weeks after becoming a committee, we initiated the ISI Astrostatistics Network, which allowed there to be any number of members. In 2012 the Network voted to become an independent global scientific association for astrostatistics and astroinformatics called the International Astrostatistics Association (IAA). Also in 2012, the Astrostatistics and Astroinformatics Portal (ASAIP) was founded at Penn State by Eric Feigelson and Joseph Hilbe, and an astrostatistics/astroinformatics interest group was formed within the IAU by Feigelson. In 2015 the IAU advanced the interest group to become IAU Commission B3 on Astroinformatics and Astrostatistics.

Within 3 years we had grown to having members from 56 nations. We are also co-sponsor of the Springer Series on Astrostatistics, and have co-sponsored a number of major conferences, including the first IAU symposium on astrostatistics held in Lisbon, Portugal in 2014 and the first Focus group session on astrostatistics held at an IAU General Assembly (2015 IAU General Assembly in Honolulu). In 2016, IAA moved its offices to the Brera Observatory in Milan (Italy) approved a new permanent logo, and opened a new (the current) website, and delivered the first IAA awards sponsored by Cambridge University Press, also advertised there.