Statistics: Concepts and Controversies

David S. Moore is Shanti S. Gupta Distinguished Professor of Statistics, Emeritus, at Purdue University and was 1998 president of the American Statistical Association. He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He has served as program director for statistics and probability at the National Science Foundation. He is the author of influential articles on statistics education and of several leading texts. William I. Notz is Professor of Statistics at the Ohio State University. His first academic job was as an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Purdue University. While there, he taught the introductory concepts course with Professor Moore and as a result of this experience he developed an interest in statistical education.

This practical textbook by David Moore and William Notz introduces a conceptual approach to statistics and shows students how use these ideas to think about the statistical claims they see every day from polls, campaigns, advertising, public policy, and many different fields of study.

The ultimate goal is to equip students with solid statistical reasoning skills that will help them understand impact of statistics on all aspects of their lives.

Undegraduate students studying mathematics and statistics

1 Where Do Data Come From?

2 Samples, Good and Bad

3 What Do Samples Tell Us?

4 Sample Surveys in the Real World

5 Experiments, Good and Bad

6 Experiments in the Real World

7 Data Ethics

8 Measuring

9 Do the Numbers Make Sense?

10 Graphs, Good and Bad

11 Displaying Distributions with Graphs

12 Describing Distributions with Numbers

13 Normal Distributions

14 Describing Relationships: Scatterplots and Correlation

15 Describing Relationships: Regression, Prediction, and Causation

16 The Consumer Price Index and Government Statistics

17 Thinking about Chance

18 Probability Models

19 Simulation

20 The House Edge: Expected Values

21 What Is a Confidence Interval?

22 What Is a Test of Significance?
23 Use and Abuse of Statistical Inference

24 Two-Way Tables and the Chi-Square Test

Index