Practical Statistics
Simply Explained
Russell Langley
Practical Statistics Simply Explained ISBN 0486227294
Purchased: December 15, 2006.
Quick read, mostly finished by December 18, 2006.
Amazon: Practical Statistics
Overall Impression
This is a really good, if hand-wavey, introduction to the ideas behind statistics. The important thing, though, is that it includes instructions for a number statistical tests and a guide to when these tests are applicable. It is therefore ideal for people who are looking for a gentle-ish introduction to statistical tests.
Notes
Most of my notes from this will be found in the RStats library, which is an implementation of most of the tests in the book (as well as some from Introduction to Statistical Inference.
Quotes
A remarkable example of estimating from a sample occured in the Second World War, when German industrial output was estimated by British and American statisticans from the serial numbers on captured equipment. It was like taking a random sample of marbles from a bag containing consecutively numbered marbles from 1 onwards, and then, with the hlp of a simple formula utilizing the size of the sample and the highest number observed in the sample, an estimate can made of the total number of marbles in the bag. According to checks made after the war, many of these estimates were quite as accurate as those made by the Germans themselves.
-- W.A. Wallis and H. V. Robterts, Statistics - A New Approach, Free Press, 1960.
Related
- REA Problem Solvers Statistics, a handy set of worked problems.
- Introduction to Statistical Inference, a much less approachable or applicable textbook on the theoretical underpinnings of statistical inference.