Hand D.J. Statistics. A Brief Insight

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. — 144 p.Statistical ideas and methods underlie just about every aspect of modern life. Sometimes the role of statistics is obvious, but often the statistical ideas and tools are hidden in the background. In either case, because of the ubiquity of statistical ideas, it is clearly extremely useful to have some understanding of them. The aim of this book is to provide such understanding.
Statistics suffers from an unfortunate but fundamental misconception which misleads people about its essential nature. This mistaken belief is that it requires extensive tedious arithmetic manipulation, and that, as a consequence, it is a dry and dusty discipline, devoid of imagination, creativity, or excitement. But this is a completely false image of the modern discipline of statistics. It is an image based on a perception dating from more than half a century ago. In particular, it entirely ignores the fact that the computer has transformed the discipline, changing it from one hinging around arithmetic to one based on the use of advanced software tools to probe data in a search for understanding and enlightenment. That is what the modern discipline is all about: the use of tools to aid perception and provide ways to shed light, routes to understanding, instruments for monitoring and guiding, and systems to assist decision-making. All of these, and more, are aspects of the modern discipline.
The aim of this book is to give the reader some understanding of this modern discipline. Now, clearly, in a book as short as this one, I cannot go into detail. Instead of detail, I have taken a high-level view, a bird’s eye view, of the entire discipline, trying to convey the nature of statistical philosophy, ideas, tools, and methods. I hope the book will give the reader some understanding of how the modern discipline works, how important it is, and, indeed, why it is so important.
The first chapter presents some basic definitions, along with illustrations to convey some of the power, importance, and, indeed, excitement of statistics. The second chapter introduces some of the most elementary of statistical ideas, ideas which the reader may well have already encountered, concerned with basic summaries of data. Chapter 3 cautions us that the validity of any conclusions we draw depends critically on the quality of the raw data, and also describes strategies for efficient collection of data. If data provide one of the legs on which statistics stands, the other is probability, and Chapter 4 introduces basic concepts of probability. Proceeding from the two legs of data and probability, in Chapter 5 statistics starts to walk, with a description of how one draws conclusions and makes inferences from data. Chapter 6 presents a lightning overview of some important statistical methods, showing how they form part of an interconnected network of ideas and methods for extracting understanding from data. Finally, Chapter 7 looks at just some of the ways the computer has impacted the discipline.