This book contains a little more than 20 of Debabrata Basu's most significant articles and writings. Debabrata Basu is internationally known for his highly influential and fundamental contributions to the foundations of statistics, survey sampling, sufficiency, and invariance. The major theorem bearing his name has had numerous applications to statistics and probability. The articles in this volume are reprints of the original articles, in a chronological order. The book also contains eleven commentaries written by some of the most distinguished scholars in the area of foundations and statistical inference. These commentaries are by George Casella and V. Gopal, Phil Dawid, Tom DiCiccio and Alastair Young, Malay Ghosh, Jay kadane, Glen Meeden, Robert Serfling, Jayaram Sethuraman, Terry Speed, and Alan Welsh.

The purpose of this volume is to provide an overview of Terry Speed’s contributions to statistics and beyond. Each of the fifteen chapters concerns a particular area of research and consists of a commentary by a subject-matter expert and selection of representative papers. The chapters, organized more or less chronologically in terms of Terry’s career, encompass a wide variety of mathematical and statistical domains, along with their application to biology and medicine. Accordingly, earlier chapters tend to be more theoretical, covering some algebra and probability theory, while later chapters concern more recent work in genetics and genomics. The chapters also span continents and generations, as they present research done over four decades, while crisscrossing the globe. The commentaries provide insight into Terry’s contributions to a particular area of research, by summarizing his work and describing its historical and scientific context, motivation, and impact. In addition to shedding light on Terry’s scientific achievements, the commentaries reveal endearing aspects of his personality, such as his intellectual curiosity, energy, humor, and generosity.

Statistical science as organized in formal academic departments is relatively new. With a few exceptions, most Statistics and Biostatistics departments have been created within the past 60 years. This book consists of a set of memoirs, one for each department in the U.S. created by the mid-1960s. The memoirs describe key aspects of the department’s history -- its founding, its growth, key people in its development, success stories (such as major research accomplishments) and the occasional failure story, PhD graduates who have had a significant impact, its impact on statistical education, and a summary of where the department stands today and its vision for the future. Read here all about how departments such as at Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford started and how they got to where they are today. The book should also be of interests to scholars in the field of disciplinary history.

This book presents a systematic and comprehensive treatment of various prior processes that have been developed over the past four decades for dealing with Bayesian approach to solving selected nonparametric inference problems. This revised edition has been substantially expanded to reflect the current interest in this area. After an overview of different prior processes, it examines the now pre-eminent Dirichlet process and its variants including hierarchical processes, then addresses new processes such as dependent Dirichlet, local Dirichlet, time-varying and spatial processes, all of which exploit the countable mixture representation of the Dirichlet process. It subsequently discusses various neutral to right type processes, including gamma and extended gamma, beta and beta-Stacy processes, and then describes the Chinese Restaurant, Indian Buffet and infinite gamma-Poisson processes, which prove to be very useful in areas such as machine learning, information retrieval and featural modeling. Tailfree and Polya tree and their extensions form a separate chapter, while the last two chapters present the Bayesian solutions to certain estimation problems pertaining to the distribution function and its functional based on complete data as well as right censored data. Because of the conjugacy property of some of these processes, most solutions are presented in closed form. However, the current interest in modeling and treating large-scale and complex data also poses a problem – the posterior distribution, which is essential to Bayesian analysis, is invariably not in a closed form, making it necessary to resort to simulation. Accordingly, the book also introduces several computational procedures, such as the Gibbs sampler, Blocked Gibbs sampler and slice sampling, highlighting essential steps of algorithms while discussing specific models. In addition, it features crucial steps of proofs and derivations, explains the relationships between different processes and provides further clarifications to promote a deeper understanding. Lastly, it includes a comprehensive list of references, equipping readers to explore further on their own.

This textbook covers the fundamentals of statistical inference and statistical theory including Bayesian and frequentist approaches and methodology possible without excessive emphasis on the underlying mathematics. This book is about some of the basic principles of statistics that are necessary to understand and evaluate methods for analyzing complex data sets. The likelihood function is used for pure likelihood inference throughout the book. There is also coverage of severity and finite population sampling. The material was developed from an introductory statistical theory course taught by the author at the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Biostatistics. Students and instructors in public health programs will benefit from the likelihood modeling approach that is used throughout the text. This will also appeal to epidemiologists and psychometricians. After a brief introduction, there are chapters on estimation, hypothesis testing, and maximum likelihood modeling. The book concludes with sections on Bayesian computation and inference. An appendix contains unique coverage of the interpretation of probability, and coverage of probability and mathematical concepts.

"There is nothing like it on the market...no others are as encyclopedic...the writing is exemplary: simple, direct, and competent." —George W. Cobb, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics, Mount Holyoke College Written in a direct and clear manner, Classic Topics on the History of Modern Mathematical Statistics: From Laplace to More Recent Times presents a comprehensive guide to the history of mathematical statistics and details the major results and crucial developments over a 200-year period. Presented in chronological order, the book features an account of the classical and modern works that are essential to understanding the applications of mathematical statistics. Divided into three parts, the book begins with extensive coverage of the probabilistic works of Laplace, who laid much of the foundations of later developments in statistical theory. Subsequently, the second part introduces 20th century statistical developments including work from Karl Pearson, Student, Fisher, and Neyman. Lastly, the author addresses post-Fisherian developments. Classic Topics on the History of Modern Mathematical Statistics: From Laplace to More Recent Times also features: A detailed account of Galton's discovery of regression and correlation as well as the subsequent development of Karl Pearson's X2 and Student's t A comprehensive treatment of the permeating influence of Fisher in all aspects of modern statistics beginning with his work in 1912 Significant coverage of Neyman–Pearson theory, which includes a discussion of the differences to Fisher’s works Discussions on key historical developments as well as the various disagreements, contrasting information, and alternative theories in the history of modern mathematical statistics in an effort to provide a thorough historical treatment Classic Topics on the History of Modern Mathematical Statistics: From Laplace to More Recent Times is an excellent reference for academicians with a mathematical background who are teaching or studying the history or philosophical controversies of mathematics and statistics. The book is also a useful guide for readers with a general interest in statistical inference.

The Palgrave Encyclopedia Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism objectively presents the prominent themes, epochal events, theoretical explanations, and historical accounts of imperialism from 1776 to the present. It is the most historically and academically comprehensive examination of the subject to date.