Introductory Statistics

Introductory Statistics, Fourth Edition, reviews statistical concepts and techniques in a manner that will teach students not only how and when to utilize the statistical procedures developed, but also how to understand why these procedures should be used. The text's main merits are the clarity of presentation, contemporary examples and applications from diverse areas, an explanation of intuition, and the ideas behind the statistical methods.

Concepts are motivated, illustrated, and explained in a way that attempts to increase one's intuition. To quote from the preface, it is only when a student develops a feel or intuition for statistics that she or he is really on the path toward making sense of data. Ross achieves this goal through a coherent mix of mathematical analysis, intuitive discussions, and examples.

Applications and examples refer to real-world issues, such as gun control, stock price models, health issues, driving age limits, school admission a ges, use of helmets, sports, scientific fraud, and many others. Examples relating to data mining techniques using the number of Google queries or Twitter tweets are also considered.

For this fourth edition, new topical coverage includes sections on Pareto distribution and the 80-20 rule, Benford's law, added material on odds and joint distributions and correlation, logistic regression, A-B testing, and more modern (big data) examples and exercises.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

1. Preface2. Introduction to Statistics3. Describing Data Sets Using Statistics to Summarize4. Data Sets Probability5. Discrete Random Variables6. Normal Random Variables7. Distributions of Sampling8. Statistics Estimation Testing9. Statistical Hypotheses10. Hypothesis Tests Concerning Two Populations11. Analysis of Variance Linear Regression12. Chi-Squared Goodness of Fit Tests13. Nonparametric Hypotheses14. Tests15. Quality Control16. Appendices

Rezension:

"The coverage is careful and slow, with many worked examples and plenty of problems, half of which have answers. ...Illuminating examples abound. Those who are less than wholly confident about any of the material will find it a rich and unthreatening resource of information and also of questions (even if they are almost all derived from a US context). I have been looking for some time for a properly academic superior to M.J. Moroney's invaluable if outdated Facts from figures which I have used for forty years, and this would seem to fill the bill." --The Mathematical Gazette

"There are some interesting topics included that are not in most introductory stats texts, such as the Gini index, bandit problems, and quality control." --MAA Reviews