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"This is a nice book containing a wealth of information, much of it due to the authors. . . . If an instructor designing such a course wanted a textbook, this book would be the best choice available. . . . There are many stimulating exercises, and the book also contains an excellent index and an extensive list of references."
—Technometrics
"[This] book should be read carefully by anyone who is interested in dealing with statistical models in a realistic fashion."
—American Scientist
Introducing concepts, theory, and applications, Robust Statistics is accessible to a broad audience, avoiding allusions to high-powered mathematics while emphasizing ideas, heuristics, and background. The text covers the approach based on the influence function (the effect of an outlier on an estimater, for example) and related notions such as the breakdown point. It also treats the change-of-variance function, fundamental concepts and results in the framework of estimation of a single parameter, and applications to estimation of covariance matrices and regression parameters.
New York Times Bestseller
“Not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War…could turn out to be one of the more momentous books of the decade.”
—New York Times Book Review
"Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise is The Soul of a New Machine for the 21st century."
—Rachel Maddow, author of Drift
"A serious treatise about the craft of prediction—without academic mathematics—cheerily aimed at lay readers. Silver's coverage is polymathic, ranging from poker and earthquakes to climate change and terrorism."
—New York Review of Books
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was thirty. He solidified his standing as the nation's foremost political forecaster with his near perfect prediction of the 2012 election. Silver is the founder and editor in chief of the website FiveThirtyEight.
Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty. Both experts and laypeople mistake more confident predictions for more accurate ones. But overconfidence is often the reason for failure. If our appreciation of uncertainty improves, our predictions can get better too. This is the “prediction paradox”: The more humility we have about our ability to make predictions, the more successful we can be in planning for the future.
In keeping with his own aim to seek truth from data, Silver visits the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA. He explains and evaluates how these forecasters think and what bonds they share. What lies behind their success? Are they good—or just lucky? What patterns have they unraveled? And are their forecasts really right? He explores unanticipated commonalities and exposes unexpected juxtapositions. And sometimes, it is not so much how good a prediction is in an absolute sense that matters but how good it is relative to the competition. In other cases, prediction is still a very rudimentary—and dangerous—science.
Silver observes that the most accurate forecasters tend to have a superior command of probability, and they tend to be both humble and hardworking. They distinguish the predictable from the unpredictable, and they notice a thousand little details that lead them closer to the truth. Because of their appreciation of probability, they can distinguish the signal from the noise.
With everything from the health of the global economy to our ability to fight terrorism dependent on the quality of our predictions, Nate Silver’s insights are an essential read.
For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions.
And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.
By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Essentials For Dummies Series
Dummies is proud to present our new series, The Essentials For Dummies. Now students who are prepping for exams, preparing to study new material, or who just need a refresher can have a concise, easy-to-understand review guide that covers an entire course by concentrating solely on the most important concepts. From algebra and chemistry to grammar and Spanish, our expert authors focus on the skills students most need to succeed in a subject.
The fun and easy way to get down to business with statistics
Stymied by statistics? No fear? this friendly guide offers clear, practical explanations of statistical ideas, techniques, formulas, and calculations, with lots of examples that show you how these concepts apply to your everyday life.
Statistics For Dummies shows you how to interpret and critique graphs and charts, determine the odds with probability, guesstimate with confidence using confidence intervals, set up and carry out a hypothesis test, compute statistical formulas, and more.
Tracks to a typical first semester statistics course Updated examples resonate with today's students Explanations mirror teaching methods and classroom protocolPacked with practical advice and real-world problems, Statistics For Dummies gives you everything you need to analyze and interpret data for improved classroom or on-the-job performance.
The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don’t even question it. That assumption, says Harvard’s Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.
In The End of Average, Rose, a rising star in the new field of the science of the individual shows that no one is average. Not you. Not your kids. Not your employees. This isn’t hollow sloganeering—it’s a mathematical fact with enormous practical consequences. But while we know people learn and develop in distinctive ways, these unique patterns of behaviors are lost in our schools and businesses which have been designed around the mythical “average person.” This average-size-fits-all model ignores our differences and fails at recognizing talent. It’s time to change it.
Weaving science, history, and his personal experiences as a high school dropout, Rose offers a powerful alternative to understanding individuals through averages: the three principles of individuality. The jaggedness principle (talent is always jagged), the context principle (traits are a myth), and the pathways principle (we all walk the road less traveled) help us understand our true uniqueness—and that of others—and how to take full advantage of individuality to gain an edge in life.
Read this powerful manifesto in the ranks of Drive, Quiet, and Mindset—and you won’t see averages or talent in the same way again.
Two of the authors co-wrote The Elements of Statistical Learning (Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman, 2nd edition 2009), a popular reference book for statistics and machine learning researchers. An Introduction to Statistical Learning covers many of the same topics, but at a level accessible to a much broader audience. This book is targeted at statisticians and non-statisticians alike who wish to use cutting-edge statistical learning techniques to analyze their data. The text assumes only a previous course in linear regression and no knowledge of matrix algebra.
The book is divided into three parts and begins with the basics: models, probability, Bayes’ rule, and the R programming language. The discussion then moves to the fundamentals applied to inferring a binomial probability, before concluding with chapters on the generalized linear model. Topics include metric-predicted variable on one or two groups; metric-predicted variable with one metric predictor; metric-predicted variable with multiple metric predictors; metric-predicted variable with one nominal predictor; and metric-predicted variable with multiple nominal predictors. The exercises found in the text have explicit purposes and guidelines for accomplishment.
This book is intended for first-year graduate students or advanced undergraduates in statistics, data analysis, psychology, cognitive science, social sciences, clinical sciences, and consumer sciences in business.
Accessible, including the basics of essential concepts of probability and random samplingExamples with R programming language and JAGS softwareComprehensive coverage of all scenarios addressed by non-Bayesian textbooks: t-tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and comparisons in ANOVA, multiple regression, and chi-square (contingency table analysis)Coverage of experiment planningR and JAGS computer programming code on websiteExercises have explicit purposes and guidelines for accomplishmentProvides step-by-step instructions on how to conduct Bayesian data analyses in the popular and free software R and WinBugs
The authors first present an overview of publicly available baseball datasets and a gentle introduction to the type of data structures and exploratory and data management capabilities of R. They also cover the traditional graphics functions in the base package and introduce more sophisticated graphical displays available through the lattice and ggplot2 packages. Much of the book illustrates the use of R through popular sabermetrics topics, including the Pythagorean formula, runs expectancy, career trajectories, simulation of games and seasons, patterns of streaky behavior of players, and fielding measures. Each chapter contains exercises that encourage readers to perform their own analyses using R. All of the datasets and R code used in the text are available online.
This book helps readers answer questions about baseball teams, players, and strategy using large, publically available datasets. It offers detailed instructions on downloading the datasets and putting them into formats that simplify data exploration and analysis. Through the book’s various examples, readers will learn about modern sabermetrics and be able to conduct their own baseball analyses.
1,001 Statistics Practice Problems For Dummies takes you beyond the instruction and guidance offered in Statistics For Dummies to give you a more hands-on understanding of statistics. The practice problems offered range in difficulty, including detailed explanations and walk-throughs.
In this series, every step of every solution is shown with explanations and detailed narratives to help you solve each problem. With the book purchase, you’ll also get access to practice statistics problems online. This content features 1,001 practice problems presented in multiple choice format; on-the-go access from smart phones, computers, and tablets; customizable practice sets for self-directed study; practice problems categorized as easy, medium, or hard; and a one-year subscription with book purchase.
Offers on-the-go access to practice statistics problems Gives you friendly, hands-on instruction 1,001 statistics practice problems that range in difficulty1,001 Statistics Practice Problems For Dummies provides ample practice opportunities for students who may have taken statistics in high school and want to review the most important concepts as they gear up for a faster-paced college class.
Each chapter presents easy-to-follow descriptions, along with graphics, formulas, solved examples, and hands-on exercises. If you want to perform common statistical analyses and learn a wide range of techniques without getting in over your head, this is your book.
Learn basic concepts of measurement and probability theory, data management, and research designDiscover basic statistical procedures, including correlation, the t-test, the chi-square and Fisher’s exact tests, and techniques for analyzing nonparametric dataLearn advanced techniques based on the general linear model, including ANOVA, ANCOVA, multiple linear regression, and logistic regressionUse and interpret statistics for business and quality improvement, medical and public health, and education and psychologyCommunicate with statistics and critique statistical information presented by othersThis major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least angle regression & path algorithms for the lasso, non-negative matrix factorization, and spectral clustering. There is also a chapter on methods for ``wide'' data (p bigger than n), including multiple testing and false discovery rates.
Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie co-developed much of the statistical modeling software and environment in R/S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, projection pursuit and gradient boosting.
- Calculating descriptive statistics
- Measures of central tendency: mean, median, and mode
- Probability
- Variance analysis
- Inferential statistics
- Hypothesis testing
- Organizing data into statistical charts and tables
The author begins with basic characteristics of financial time series data before covering three main topics:
Analysis and application of univariate financial time series The return series of multiple assets Bayesian inference in finance methodsKey features of the new edition include additional coverage of modern day topics such as arbitrage, pair trading, realized volatility, and credit risk modeling; a smooth transition from S-Plus to R; and expanded empirical financial data sets.
The overall objective of the book is to provide some knowledge of financial time series, introduce some statistical tools useful for analyzing these series and gain experience in financial applications of various econometric methods.
". . . [this book] should be on the shelf of everyone interested in . . . longitudinal data analysis."
—Journal of the American Statistical Association
Features newly developed topics and applications of the analysis of longitudinal data
Applied Longitudinal Analysis, Second Edition presents modern methods for analyzing data from longitudinal studies and now features the latest state-of-the-art techniques. The book emphasizes practical, rather than theoretical, aspects of methods for the analysis of diverse types of longitudinal data that can be applied across various fields of study, from the health and medical sciences to the social and behavioral sciences.
The authors incorporate their extensive academic and research experience along with various updates that have been made in response to reader feedback. The Second Edition features six newly added chapters that explore topics currently evolving in the field, including:
Fixed effects and mixed effects models Marginal models and generalized estimating equations Approximate methods for generalized linear mixed effects models Multiple imputation and inverse probability weighted methods Smoothing methods for longitudinal data Sample size and powerEach chapter presents methods in the setting of applications to data sets drawn from the health sciences. New problem sets have been added to many chapters, and a related website features sample programs and computer output using SAS, Stata, and R, as well as data sets and supplemental slides to facilitate a complete understanding of the material.
With its strong emphasis on multidisciplinary applications and the interpretation of results, Applied Longitudinal Analysis, Second Edition is an excellent book for courses on statistics in the health and medical sciences at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. The book also serves as a valuable reference for researchers and professionals in the medical, public health, and pharmaceutical fields as well as those in social and behavioral sciences who would like to learn more about analyzing longitudinal data.
Recent advances in the field, particularly Parrondo's paradox, have triggered a surge of interest in the statistical and mathematical theory behind gambling. This interest was acknowledge in the motion picture, "21," inspired by the true story of the MIT students who mastered the art of card counting to reap millions from the Vegas casinos. Richard Epstein's classic book on gambling and its mathematical analysis covers the full range of games from penny matching to blackjack, from Tic-Tac-Toe to the stock market (including Edward Thorp's warrant-hedging analysis). He even considers whether statistical inference can shed light on the study of paranormal phenomena. Epstein is witty and insightful, a pleasure to dip into and read and rewarding to study. The book is written at a fairly sophisticated mathematical level; this is not "Gambling for Dummies" or "How To Beat The Odds Without Really Trying." A background in upper-level undergraduate mathematics is helpful for understanding this work.
o Comprehensive and exciting analysis of all major casino games and variants o Covers a wide range of interesting topics not covered in other books on the subject o Depth and breadth of its material is unique compared to other books of this nature
Richard Epstein's website: www.gamblingtheory.net
Advanced stats give hockeyÍs powerbrokers an edge, and now fans can get in on the action. Stat Shot is a fun and informative guide hockey fans can use to understand and enjoy what analytics says about team building, a playerÍs junior numbers, measuring faceoff success, recording save percentage, the most one-sided trades in history, and everything you ever wanted to know about shot-based metrics. Acting as an invaluable supplement to traditional analysis, Stat Shot can be used to test the validity of conventional wisdom, and to gain insight into what teams are doing behind the scenes „ or maybe what they should be doing.
Whether looking for a reference for leading-edge research and hard-to-find statistical data, or for passionate and engaging storytelling, Stat Shot belongs on every serious hockey fanÍs bookshelf.
· Downloadable data sets
· Library of computer programs in SAS, SPSS, Stata, HLM, MLwiN, and more
· Additional material for data analysis
But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of "miracle" is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.
Together, these constitute Hand's groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day. Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives—including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective.
An irresistible adventure into the laws behind "chance" moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in, The Improbability Principle will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it's in the world of business and finance or you're merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.
The authors present the material in an accessible style and motivate concepts using real-world examples. Throughout, they use stories to uncover connections between the fundamental distributions in statistics and conditioning to reduce complicated problems to manageable pieces.
The book includes many intuitive explanations, diagrams, and practice problems. Each chapter ends with a section showing how to perform relevant simulations and calculations in R, a free statistical software environment.
Authors Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund guide you through the steps of importing, wrangling, exploring, and modeling your data and communicating the results. You’ll get a complete, big-picture understanding of the data science cycle, along with basic tools you need to manage the details. Each section of the book is paired with exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned along the way.
You’ll learn how to:
Wrangle—transform your datasets into a form convenient for analysisProgram—learn powerful R tools for solving data problems with greater clarity and easeExplore—examine your data, generate hypotheses, and quickly test themModel—provide a low-dimensional summary that captures true "signals" in your datasetCommunicate—learn R Markdown for integrating prose, code, and resultsThe second edition adds a discussion of vector auto-regressive, structural vector auto-regressive, and structural vector error-correction models. To analyze the interactions between the investigated variables, further impulse response function and forecast error variance decompositions are introduced as well as forecasting. The author explains how these model types relate to each other.
"Seamless R and C++ integration with Rcpp" is simply a wonderful book. For anyone who uses C/C++ and R, it is an indispensable resource. The writing is outstanding. A huge bonus is the section on applications. This section covers the matrix packages Armadillo and Eigen and the GNU Scientific Library as well as RInside which enables you to use R inside C++. These applications are what most of us need to know to really do scientific programming with R and C++. I love this book. -- Robert McCulloch, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Rcpp is now considered an essential package for anybody doing serious computational research using R. Dirk's book is an excellent companion and takes the reader from a gentle introduction to more advanced applications via numerous examples and efficiency enhancing gems. The book is packed with all you might have ever wanted to know about Rcpp, its cousins (RcppArmadillo, RcppEigen .etc.), modules, package development and sugar. Overall, this book is a must-have on your shelf. -- Sanjog Misra, UCLA Anderson School of Management
The Rcpp package represents a major leap forward for scientific computations with R. With very few lines of C++ code, one has R's data structures readily at hand for further computations in C++. Hence, high-level numerical programming can be made in C++ almost as easily as in R, but often with a substantial speed gain. Dirk is a crucial person in these developments, and his book takes the reader from the first fragile steps on to using the full Rcpp machinery. A very recommended book! -- Søren Højsgaard, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Aalborg University, Denmark
"Seamless R and C ++ Integration with Rcpp" provides the first comprehensive introduction to Rcpp. Rcpp has become the most widely-used language extension for R, and is deployed by over one-hundred different CRAN and BioConductor packages. Rcpp permits users to pass scalars, vectors, matrices, list or entire R objects back and forth between R and C++ with ease. This brings the depth of the R analysis framework together with the power, speed, and efficiency of C++.
Dirk Eddelbuettel has been a contributor to CRAN for over a decade and maintains around twenty packages. He is the Debian/Ubuntu maintainer for R and other quantitative software, edits the CRAN Task Views for Finance and High-Performance Computing, is a co-founder of the annual R/Finance conference, and an editor of the Journal of Statistical Software. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Economics from EHESS (Paris), and works in Chicago as a Senior Quantitative Analyst.
addresses tasks that nearly every SAS programmer needs to do - that is, make
sure that data errors are located and corrected. This book develops and
demonstrates data cleaning programs and macros that you can use as written or
modify for your own special data cleaning needs.
"It is, as far as I'm concerned, among the best books in math ever written....if you are a mathematician and want to have the top reference in probability, this is it." (Amazon.com, January 2006)
A complete and comprehensive classic in probability and measure theory
Probability and Measure, Anniversary Edition by Patrick Billingsley celebrates the achievements and advancements that have made this book a classic in its field for the past 35 years. Now re-issued in a new style and format, but with the reliable content that the third edition was revered for, this Anniversary Edition builds on its strong foundation of measure theory and probability with Billingsley's unique writing style. In recognition of 35 years of publication, impacting tens of thousands of readers, this Anniversary Edition has been completely redesigned in a new, open and user-friendly way in order to appeal to university-level students.
This book adds a new foreward by Steve Lally of the Statistics Department at The University of Chicago in order to underscore the many years of successful publication and world-wide popularity and emphasize the educational value of this book. The Anniversary Edition contains features including:
An improved treatment of Brownian motion Replacement of queuing theory with ergodic theory Theory and applications used to illustrate real-life situations Over 300 problems with corresponding, intensive notes and solutions Updated bibliography An extensive supplement of additional notes on the problems and chapter commentariesPatrick Billingsley was a first-class, world-renowned authority in probability and measure theory at a leading U.S. institution of higher education. He continued to be an influential probability theorist until his unfortunate death in 2011. Billingsley earned his Bachelor's Degree in Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy where he served as an officer. he went on to receive his Master's Degree and doctorate in Mathematics from Princeton University.Among his many professional awards was the Mathematical Association of America's Lester R. Ford Award for mathematical exposition. His achievements through his long and esteemed career have solidified Patrick Billingsley's place as a leading authority in the field and been a large reason for his books being regarded as classics.
This Anniversary Edition of Probability and Measure offers advanced students, scientists, and engineers an integrated introduction to measure theory and probability. Like the previous editions, this Anniversary Edition is a key resource for students of mathematics, statistics, economics, and a wide variety of disciplines that require a solid understanding of probability theory.
Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals provides hands-on instruction and fully-coded working examples for the most common machine learning techniques used by developers and technical professionals. The book contains a breakdown of each ML variant, explaining how it works and how it is used within certain industries, allowing readers to incorporate the presented techniques into their own work as they follow along. A core tenant of machine learning is a strong focus on data preparation, and a full exploration of the various types of learning algorithms illustrates how the proper tools can help any developer extract information and insights from existing data. The book includes a full complement of Instructor's Materials to facilitate use in the classroom, making this resource useful for students and as a professional reference.
At its core, machine learning is a mathematical, algorithm-based technology that forms the basis of historical data mining and modern big data science. Scientific analysis of big data requires a working knowledge of machine learning, which forms predictions based on known properties learned from training data. Machine Learning is an accessible, comprehensive guide for the non-mathematician, providing clear guidance that allows readers to:
Learn the languages of machine learning including Hadoop, Mahout, and Weka Understand decision trees, Bayesian networks, and artificial neural networks Implement Association Rule, Real Time, and Batch learning Develop a strategic plan for safe, effective, and efficient machine learningBy learning to construct a system that can learn from data, readers can increase their utility across industries. Machine learning sits at the core of deep dive data analysis and visualization, which is increasingly in demand as companies discover the goldmine hiding in their existing data. For the tech professional involved in data science, Machine Learning: Hands-On for Developers and Technical Professionals provides the skills and techniques required to dig deeper.
Across various industries, compensation professionals work to organize and analyze aspects of employment that deal with elements of pay, such as deciding base salary, bonus, and commission provided by an employer to its employees for work performed. Acknowledging the numerous quantitative analyses of data that are a part of this everyday work, Statistics for Compensation provides a comprehensive guide to the key statistical tools and techniques needed to perform those analyses and to help organizations make fully informed compensation decisions.
This self-contained book is the first of its kind to explore the use of various quantitative methods—from basic notions about percents to multiple linear regression—that are used in the management, design, and implementation of powerful compensation strategies. Drawing upon his extensive experience as a consultant, practitioner, and teacher of both statistics and compensation, the author focuses on the usefulness of the techniques and their immediate application to everyday compensation work, thoroughly explaining major areas such as:
Frequency distributions and histograms
Measures of location and variability
Model building
Linear models
Exponential curve models
Maturity curve models
Power models
Market models and salary survey analysis
Linear and exponential integrated market models
Job pricing market models
Throughout the book, rigorous definitions and step-by-step procedures clearly explain and demonstrate how to apply the presented statistical techniques. Each chapter concludes with a set of exercises, and various case studies showcase the topic's real-world relevance. The book also features an extensive glossary of key statistical terms and an appendix with technical details. Data for the examples and practice problems are available in the book and on a related FTP site.
Statistics for Compensation is an excellent reference for compensation professionals, human resources professionals, and other practitioners responsible for any aspect of base pay, incentive pay, sales compensation, and executive compensation in their organizations. It can also serve as a supplement for compensation courses at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels.
The Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo provides a reference for the broad audience of developers and users of MCMC methodology interested in keeping up with cutting-edge theory and applications. The first half of the book covers MCMC foundations, methodology, and algorithms. The second half considers the use of MCMC in a variety of practical applications including in educational research, astrophysics, brain imaging, ecology, and sociology.
The in-depth introductory section of the book allows graduate students and practicing scientists new to MCMC to become thoroughly acquainted with the basic theory, algorithms, and applications. The book supplies detailed examples and case studies of realistic scientific problems presenting the diversity of methods used by the wide-ranging MCMC community. Those familiar with MCMC methods will find this book a useful refresher of current theory and recent developments.
"This book is . . . an excellent source of examples for regression analysis. It has been and still is readily readable and understandable."
—Journal of the American Statistical Association Regression analysis is a conceptually simple method for investigating relationships among variables. Carrying out a successful application of regression analysis, however, requires a balance of theoretical results, empirical rules, and subjective judgment. Regression Analysis by Example, Fifth Edition has been expanded and thoroughly updated to reflect recent advances in the field. The emphasis continues to be on exploratory data analysis rather than statistical theory. The book offers in-depth treatment of regression diagnostics, transformation, multicollinearity, logistic regression, and robust regression.
The book now includes a new chapter on the detection and correction of multicollinearity, while also showcasing the use of the discussed methods on newly added data sets from the fields of engineering, medicine, and business. The Fifth Edition also explores additional topics, including:
Surrogate ridge regression Fitting nonlinear models Errors in variables ANOVA for designed experimentsMethods of regression analysis are clearly demonstrated, and examples containing the types of irregularities commonly encountered in the real world are provided. Each example isolates one or two techniques and features detailed discussions, the required assumptions, and the evaluated success of each technique. Additionally, methods described throughout the book can be carried out with most of the currently available statistical software packages, such as the software package R.
Regression Analysis by Example, Fifth Edition is suitable for anyone with an understanding of elementary statistics.
Treating these topics together takes advantage of all they have in common. The authors point out the many-shared elements in the methods they present for selecting, estimating, checking, and interpreting each of these models. They also show that these regression methods deal with confounding, mediation, and interaction of causal effects in essentially the same way.
The examples, analyzed using Stata, are drawn from the biomedical context but generalize to other areas of application. While a first course in statistics is assumed, a chapter reviewing basic statistical methods is included. Some advanced topics are covered but the presentation remains intuitive. A brief introduction to regression analysis of complex surveys and notes for further reading are provided. For many students and researchers learning to use these methods, this one book may be all they need to conduct and interpret multipredictor regression analyses.
The authors are on the faculty in the Division of Biostatistics, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, and are authors or co-authors of more than 200 methodological as well as applied papers in the biological and biomedical sciences. The senior author, Charles E. McCulloch, is head of the Division and author of Generalized Linear Mixed Models (2003), Generalized, Linear, and Mixed Models (2000), and Variance Components (1992).
From the reviews:
"This book provides a unified introduction to the regression methods listed in the title...The methods are well illustrated by data drawn from medical studies...A real strength of this book is the careful discussion of issues common to all of the multipredictor methods covered." Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, 2005
"This book is not just for biostatisticians. It is, in fact, a very good, and relatively nonmathematical, overview of multipredictor regression models. Although the examples are biologically oriented, they are generally easy to understand and follow...I heartily recommend the book" Technometrics, February 2006
"Overall, the text provides an overview of regression methods that is particularly strong in its breadth of coverage and emphasis on insight in place of mathematical detail. As intended, this well-unified approach should appeal to students who learn conceptually and verbally." Journal of the American Statistical Association, March 2006
The first third of The Statistical Analysis of Experimental Data comprises a thorough grounding in the fundamental mathematical definitions, concepts, and facts underlying modern statistical theory — math knowledge beyond basic algebra, calculus, and analytic geometry is not required. Remaining chapters deal with statistics as an interpretative tool that can enable the laboratory researcher to determine his most effective methodology. You'll find lucid, concise coverage of over 130 topics, including elements of measurement; nature of statistical analysis; design/analysis of experiments; statistics as diagnostic tool; precision and accuracy; testing statistical models; between-within classifications; two-way classifications; sampling (principles, objectives, methods); fitting of non-linear models; measurement of processes; components of variance; nested designs; the sensitivity ratio, and much more.
Also included are many examples, each worked in step-by-step fashion; nearly 200 helpful figures and tables; and concluding chapter summaries followed by references for further study.
Mandel argues that, when backed by an understanding of its theoretic framework, statistics offers researchers "not only a powerful tool for the interpretation of experiments but also a task of real intellectual gratification." The Statistical Analysis of Experimental Data provides the physical scientist with the explanations and models he requires to impress this invaluable tool into service.