Statistics for physical science: an introduction

Statistical Methods for the Physical Sciences is an informal, relatively short, but systematic, guide to the more commonly used ideas and techniques in statistical analysis, as used in physical sciences, together with explanations of their origins. It steers a path between the extremes of a recipe of methods with a collection of useful formulas, and a full mathematical account of statistics, while at the same time developing the subject in a logical way. The book can be read in its entirety by anyone with a basic exposure to mathematics at the level of a first-year undergraduate student of physical science and should be useful for practising physical scientists, plus undergraduate and postgraduate students in these fields. - Problems at the end of each chapter - All the chapters contain worked examples - Collection of useful formulas in order to give a detailed account of mathematical statistics.

"Statistics in physical science is principally concerned with the analysis of numerical data, so in Chapter 1 there is a review of what is meant by an experiment, and how the data that it produces are displayed and characterized by a few simple numbers"--

Machine generated contents note: Preface, Acknowledgements, Statistics, Experiments, and Data, Probability, Probability Distributions: Basic Concepts Probability Distributions: Examples, Sampling and Estimation, Sampling Distributions associated with the Normal Distribution, Point Estimation I: Maximum Likelihood, Point Estimation II: Least-Squares Method, Point Estimation III: Other Methods, Confidence Intervals and Regions, Hypothesis Testing, Appendices, Summary of Distribution Properties, Miscellaneous Mathematics, Orthogonal Polynomials, Optimization of Functions of Several Variables, Statistical Tables, Solutions to Problems, Bibliography, Index.

Preface, Acknowledgements, Statistics, Experiments, and Data, Probability, Probability Distributions: Basic Concepts Probability Distributions: Examples, Sampling and Estimation, Sampling Distributions associated with the Normal Distribution, Point Estimation I: Maximum Likelihood, Point Estimation II: Least-Squares Method, Point Estimation III: Other Methods, Confidence Intervals and Regions, Hypothesis Testing, Appendices, Summary of Distribution Properties, Miscellaneous Mathematics, Orthogonal Polynomials, Optimization of Functions of Several Variables, Statistical Tables, Solutions to Problems, Bibliography, Index.