The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data

by David Spiegelhalter

Traditionally a statistics course would start with probability – that is how I have always begun when teaching in Cambridge – but this rather mathematical initiation can be an obstruction to grasping all the important ideas in the preceding chapters that did not require probability theory. In contrast, this book is part of what could be called a new wave in statistics teaching, in which formal probability theory as a basis for statistical inference does not come in till much later.2 We have seen that computer simulation is a very powerful tool for both exploring possible future events and bootstrapping historical data, but it is a rather clumsy and brute-force way of carrying out statistical analysis. So although we have got a long way while avoiding formal probability theory, it is time to face up to its vital role in providing ‘the language of uncertainty’.

Probablity as language of uncertainty