Probability and statistics for engineering and the sciences

What Hacker News says

1. stevegallaMar 2021
   > Start with Wasserman

   If you're referring to "All of Statistics" by Wasserman, then there are some significantly easier textbooks to learn statistics from. Depending on the program, "All of Statistics" is a book used by senior undergrads or grad students. Are there more mathematical heavy stats books, yes, but this isn't a casual read for someone who is trying to learn statistics either.

   I like "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences" by Devore as an intro book. It covers the basics of probability distributions, maximum likelihood and method of moments estimation, ANOVA, and linear regression. Pre-requisite knowledge is probably multivariable calculus, matrix multiplication, determinants, and eigenvalues.

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2. trealiraOct 2023
   There's this great series of lectures I watched during my intro to statistics and probability course: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQfiOKXnQpw_l0rbiV_QW8lwl...

   It goes over Bayes' Theorem early on, which I assume is Bayesian-by-default. I didn't realize this isn't universal.

   I watched it because my professor seemed to be teaching from the same textbook, so it followed the same general course structure. The textbook we used was "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences — 9th edition". You can find a PDF of the eighth edition just by googling the name.

   You could probably follow along just by taking notes during the video lectures, but if you want to give yourself homework, the textbook provides a lot of practice problems.

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3. fotbrNov 2016
   One thing I rarely see brought up is that people lie to exit poll takers. Maybe I'm just stupid, or politics are too far above my understanding, but I don't understand why exit polling is taken as gospel (see 2000 shrub vs bore, or brexit if you prefer an international flavor), given there's absolutely zero requirement that responses be truthful.

   I know I wasn't good with my statistics classes (I managed low to mid "A"s, but I never really understood the steps I was reproducing, or the why behind the process), but how do you correct for that type of uncertainty?

   Is there a good, basic statistics reference that HN would recommend? We used Devore's "Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences", and it didn't "click" with me. I'd love to find a good textbook on the subject.

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