A Modern Introduction to Probability and Statistics

Probability and Statistics are studied by most science students. Many current texts in the area are just cookbooks and, as a result, students do not know why they perform the methods they are taught, or why the methods work. This book readdresses these shortcomings; by using examples, often from real-life and using real data, the authors show how the fundamentals of probabilistic and statistical theories arise intuitively. There are numerous quick exercises to give direct feedback to students, and over 350 exercises, half of which have answers, of which half have full solutions. A website gives access to the data files used in the text, and, for instructors, the remaining solutions. The only prerequisite is a first course in calculus.

Developed from tried and tested course material, this book provides a self-contained course that is also suitable for self-study Uses real examples and real data sets that will be familiar to students Features quick exercises to give direct feedback to the student, and over 350 exercises Includes an introduction to the bootstrap, a modern method that is often missing in other books Includes full solutions to half the exercises given in the book; solutions to the rest are provided on an accompanying website Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras Request lecturer material: sn.pub/lecturer-material

Autorentext

Michel Dekking, Cor Kraaikamp, Rik Lopuhaä and Ludolf Meester are professors in the Department of Applied Mathematics at TU Delft, The Netherlands. The material in this book has been successfully taught there for several years, and at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and Wesleyan University, USA, since 2003.

Inhalt
Why probability and statistics?.- Outcomes, events, and probability.- Conditional probability and independence.- Discrete random variables.- Continuous random variables.- Simulation.- Expectation and variance.- Computations with random variables.- Joint distributions and independence.- Covariance and correlation.- More computations with more random variables.- The Poisson process.- The law of large numbers.- The central limit theorem.- Exploratory data analysis: graphical summaries.- Exploratory data analysis: numerical summaries.- Basic statistical models.- The bootstrap.- Unbiased estimators.- Efficiency and mean squared error.- Maximum likelihood.- The method of least squares.- Confidence intervals for the mean.- More on confidence intervals.- Testing hypotheses: essentials.- Testing hypotheses: elaboration.- The t-test.- Comparing two samples.