Statistics for Physical Sciences: An Introduction

Statistics for 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.

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