Basic Statistical Thought grew out of my teaching graduate and undergraduate statistics courses for many years, and from my experience as a statistical consultant and collaborator. I wanted to write a text that
explains the likelihood way of thinking about data,
introduces modern statistical computing, and
has lots of real examples.
The book is an undergraduate textbook in statistical thinking with a likelihood emphasis for students with the ability to think abstractly. "Statistical thinking" means a focus on ideas that statisticians care about as opposed to technical details of how to put those ideas into practice. The book does contain technical details, but they are not the focus. "Likelihood emphasis" means that the likelihood function and likelihood principle are used as the fundamental ideas for modeling data.
The book is written with the statistical language R embedded throughout. R and accompanying manuals are available for free download from http://www.r-project.org.
Basic Statistical Thought is not finished, and probably never will be, but is sufficiently complete to be used as a course text by knowledgable instructors. Material will be added and corrections will be made. Let me know your suggestions and any errors you find. And please let me hear about your experience reading the book or using it as a text.
Basic Statistical Thought is available for free download. Because it is not handled by a commercial publisher, it will not be advertised as most commercial texts are. Therefore it must rely on word of mouth. If you like it, please let others know. If you don't like it, please let me know, especially if you can say why. I may not adopt your suggestions but I will take them seriously.
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USER CONTRIBUTIONS: Are you able to contribute an example, an exercise, solutions, new data sets, new material, anything else? Email me, and I may be able to add it to this site, with proper attribution, of course.