This is a recent addition to the excellent and highly-affordable Arnold Texts in Statistics series. The material has grown out of a thirty-hour lecture course given by the author and it is aimed at final-year undergraduate and MSc students and also as a source of reference on modern statistical methods for research scientists and postgraduate students.
The book begins with a very apt quotation from Aristotle about learning by doing: this is a book about ‘doing’ stochastic modelling via an experiential treatment of the subject. The material is well-motivated by means of real data sets which have largely arisen out of the author’s long-standing research collaborations with mainly-biological scientists. Many ofthe late-twentieth-century developments in Statistics are covered and illustrated; the coverage is impressively wide-ranging and is brief and to-the-point rather than deep on each individual topic. The book is well-illustrated using the visualisation tools offered by MATLAB which is also used as a programming environment. Around fifty MATLAB programmes are described and used in the book and they (along with S-Plus equivalents) are available from the book’s website. One-hundred and seventy-five mainly-practical exercises are included and solutions and comments on a selection of them are provided. The author has taken the trouble to provide many interesting and helpful applied and theoretical references (fourteen pages in all) so that readers can deepen thei r knowledge and experience of any particular topic
