A Topical Dictionary of Statistics

Book Preface

Statistics is the accepted body of methods for summarizing or describing data and drawing conclusions from the summary measures. Everyone who has data to summarize thus needs some knowledge of statistics. The first step in gaining that knowledge is to master the professional jargon. This dictionary is geared to offer more than the usual string of isolated and independent definitions: it provides also the context, applications, and related terminology.

The intended audience falls into five groups with rather different needs: (1) professional statisticians who need to recall a definition, (2) scientists in disciplines other than statistics who need to know the acceptable methods of summarizing data, (3) students of statistics who need to broaden their knowledge of their subject matter and make constant reference to it, (4) managers who will be reading statistical reports written by their employees, and (5) journalists who need to interpret government or scientific reports and transmit the information to the public.

In every case the word or phrase to be defined should be looked up in the alphabetical index, which will refer the reader to a page in the text. The professional statistician may then find the word and its definition and be finished. Other readers are no doubt looking for more information-for background, related words, and an understanding of how this topic fits into the scheme of things. For this purpose the dictionary has been arranged topically rather than alphabetically, and in connected discourse rather than in paragraphs related only by the first few letters of one word. Depending on how much knowledge of the subject is desired, the reader will want to go back a few paragraphs or to the beginning of the chapter and read further. I have even been assured by some professors of statistics that students of statistics will
benefit by reading the dictionary from cover to cover. That will give some idea of the “big picture” and help substitute for gaps in educational training The first chapter, Summarizing Data, has been written particularly for those  who have no background in statistics and may be worth their while as an introduction to the book.

In trying to meet the needs of so many, I have tried to stay one level below what a theoretical statistician would like to see. In doing so, I run the risk of falling a little short of absolute rigor, but I have tried not to sacrifice the things that matter in applications. I hope this effort will be worthwhile for the manager and journalist. The question of what to include and what to leave out has arisen many times. There are many specialties in statistics and I have decided to omit terms which are peculiar to a small audience. On the other hand, I have included a number of general but rarely used terms for the sake of completeness, and I can only hope that the reader wili bear with me on this matter. There are terms whose use is discouraged and areas where one needs to take great care to avoid misstatements. I have tried to point these out to the reader.

Contents
Preface VII
1. Summarizing Data 1
2. Random Variables and Probability Distributions 9
3. Some Useful Distributions 17
4. Estimation and Hypothesis Testing 29
5. Regression 47
6. The Design of Experiments and the Analysis of Variance 67
7. Reliability and Survival Analysis 79
8. Order Statistics 89
9. Stochastic Processes 95
10. Time Series 105
11. Categorical Data 113
12. Epidemiology 119
13. Quality Control and Acceptance Sampling 129
14. Multivariate Analysis 135
15. Survey Sampling 143
Index 149