A First Course in Probability Models and Statistical Inference

Welcome to new territory: A course in probability models and statistical inference. The concept of probability is not new to you of course. You’ve encountered it since childhood in games of chance-card games, for example, or games with dice or coins. And you know about the 90% chance of rain from weather reports. But once you get beyond simple expressions of probability into more subtle analysis, it’s new territory. And very foreign territory it is. You must have encountered reports of statistical results in voter sur veys, opinion polls, and other such studies, but how are conclusions from those studies obtained? How can you interview just a few voters the day before an election and still determine fairly closely how HUN DREDS of THOUSANDS of voters will vote? That’s statistics. You’ll find it very interesting during this first course to see how a properly designed statistical study can achieve so much knowledge from such drastically incomplete information. It really is possible-statistics works! But HOW does it work? By the end of this course you’ll have understood that and much more. Welcome to the enchanted forest.