The Singapore Institute of Statistics (SIS) was established in 1976 as a professional non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing the field of statistics in Singapore. Founded by Prof Saw Swee Hock as its first President, the Institute grew quickly, and in 1980 was admitted as a founding member of the Singapore National Academy of Science (SNAS), alongside sister bodies such as the Singapore Mathematical Society and the Institute of Physics.

Over the following decades, SIS built a track record of promoting statistical education and exchange — co-organising the Southeast Asian Statistics Seminar series through the 1980s with participants from across Asia, Australia, and Europe, and running regular talks jointly with the Department of Statistics and Applied Probability at the National University of Singapore. In 1988, a members' logo competition produced the Institute's distinctive three-dimensional bar-chart emblem, still in use today. SIS also organised the Pacific Asia Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference (PAKDD) in 2006 and 2007.

More recently, under the presidency of Ng Kwan Kee, SIS partnered with the EcoMod Network to bring Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modeling courses to Singapore, and endorsed conferences held by the Market Research Society of Singapore. In 2026, the Institute welcomed a new Council and aligned closely with the Statistics and Data Science department of National University of Singapore.