A First Course in Statistics

by James T. McClave, Terry T. Sincich

This practical introduction to statistics combines fundamental theory with present day applications and includes numerous examples from journals, magazines, news articles, and commerce to help readers learn how to analyze data that appear in situations in the world around them. Stresses the importance of data collection, observations, experiments, and surveys in drawing meaningful inferences from data. Discusses methods for describing data sets (detecting outliers and graphing relationships between variables); probability; random variables and probability distributions (assessing normality that covers normal probability plots); inferences based on a single sample: tests of hypothesis; comparing population proportions; simple linear regression, and much more. Features over 800 applied exercises with real data, plus a pertinent " Statistics in Action" case in each chapter (i.e., "IQ, Economic Mobility, and the Bell Curve," "March Madness--Handicapping the NCAA Basketball Tourney"). Wherever appropriate, a box describing the keystrokes and output of TI-8 graphing calculator are inserted into sections. For business, engineering, and science professionals.

Genres: Textbooks

539 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Jimyanni · Rating 4 out of 5]

As Math textbooks go, this one's pretty good. It has a nice variety of problems for the student to work at the end of each subchapter, from easy ones to advanced ones, and the explanations are actually not bad. As a supplement to a course on Statistics, this is a very useful book. As with almost all Math texts, of course, it is almost completely useless on its own; it's a very rare individual indeed who can learn anything from reading a Math textbook without have someone lecturing and explaining the material; this is a problem innate to Math textbooks, given that a textbook cannot tailor the level of explanation to the student and give as much explanation as needed in the areas that the student finds difficult, without insulting the intelligence of the student in all other areas.This book in no way proves an exception to this rule, but it is no worse than most texts in this regard and is actually somewhat better than most.