Need recommendation: useful book about statistics?

[ozymandias]

Hi,

I'm in need of a book recommendation .
As a practicing physicist I get to use some statistics now and then. I've been through all of the introductory probability courses and I can solve textbook problems (after scratching my head for a bit). The problem is, I've never really gotten comfortable around statistics. I always get the feeling my understanding of it is superficial.
I'm not looking for a heavy 4kg, 1000-pages tome, nor am I looking for some introductory book that will waste my time with its low signal-to-noise ratio. I was hoping for a book that would talk about statistics from a physicist's perspective: from maximum likelood estimation, to cool tricks you can do with probability distributions (such as estimating the electron's charge from current noise which can be modeled using a Poisson process), to things you should watch out for when using the Chi^2 distribution to estimate the "correctness" of your results. Something an experimentalist could put to good use. If the book would also have some "sexy" topics, such as Levy distributions/fat tails and so forth, that would be a plus, but not a necessity.
It doesn't have to be a physics book per-se. I don't care if the examples are from biology, or structural engineering, or genetics.
I'd really appreciate any suggestions you make .

 

[EnumaElish]

Check out CRC publications; they have near-exhaustive formulaic books on almost any technical subject.

Evans, Hastings, Peacock is a neat little book that describes probability distributions and relationships between them.

If you are looking for more intuition, though, I'll suggest Mood, Graybill, Boes.

Stat e-books include the following, but I am not personally familiar with these:
http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stathome.html
http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Statistics
http://wiki.stat.ucla.edu/socr/index.php/EBook

 

[tacman]

Hi there,

As a fellow physicist, I completely understand your struggle with statistics. However, I have found "The Cartoon Guide to Statistics" by Larry Gonick to be a fun and informative read. It covers all the basics of statistics in a visual and easy-to-understand format. It also includes some advanced topics such as hypothesis testing and regression analysis. Plus, as a bonus, it includes some "sexy" topics like the Central Limit Theorem and the Normal Distribution. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to improve their understanding of statistics in a practical and enjoyable way.

Another book that may be of interest to you is "Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial" by D. S. Sivia. This book takes a more mathematical approach to statistics and covers topics such as maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian inference. It also includes real-world examples and exercises to help you apply the concepts.

I hope these recommendations help you in your search for a useful book on statistics. Happy reading!