Modern elementary statistics

Although Modern Elementary Statistics has been rewritten almost completely in this edition, its objectives have remained the same: to acquaint beginning students in the natural and social sciences with the fundamentals of modern statistics. Most of the illustrations and exercises are new, distributed as impartially as possible among the various fields of application.
The emphasis and order of some of the material has been changed in line with recent developments in the field of statistics. There is increased emphasis on statistical inference, with three chapters on tests on hypotheses, including one on nonparametric tests; there is also a brief and informal introduction to the subject of decision making in the face of uncertainty. So far as changes in order are concerned, the introduction to theoretical distributions is delayed until after the chapter on probability, index numbers are included in the part on descriptive statistics as an optional chapter, and the chapter on time series immediately follows those on regression and correlation, consisting at least in part of an application of the material on regression.