The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data

Statistics can be powerful, but also mystical. This book attempts to take the mystery out by building up knowledge from the ground up. Statistical topics are developed using real world applications and then analyzed from a "brute force" method. Then the math is applied as an "easy solution" to the problems. The author also pull from his experience using statistics in various cases. One that is covered multiple times is the doctor that had killed is patients. Naive statistical analysis could have caught him. However, it would also have caught innocent doctors. It is important to do more thorough statistical analysis as well as look at the real world conditions. The book concludes with an analysis of statistics and the state of scientific research. P-values have been taken as gospel and many "tricks" have been used by researchers to get publishable results, even if these are not really meaningful.