A readable, digestible introduction to essential theory and wealth of applications, with a vast set of examples and numerous exercises.

The core of this paper is a general set of variational principles for the problems of computing marginal probabilities and modes, applicable to multivariate statistical models in the exponential family.

Algebraic statistics uses tools from algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, combinatorics, and their computational sides to address problems in statistics and its applications. The starting point for this connection is the observation that many statistical models are semialgebraic sets. The algebra/statistics connection is now over twenty years old, and this book presents the first broad introductory treatment of the subject. Along with background material in probability, algebra, and statistics, this book covers a range of topics in algebraic statistics including algebraic exponential families, likelihood inference, Fisher's exact test, bounds on entries of contingency tables, design of experiments, identifiability of hidden variable models, phylogenetic models, and model selection. With numerous examples, references, and over 150 exercises, this book is suitable for both classroom use and independent study.

This book gives a comprehensive introduction to exponential family nonlinear models, which are the natural extension of generalized linear models and normal nonlinear regression models. The differential geometric framework is presented for these models and geometric methods are widely used in this book. This book is ideally suited for researchers in statistical interfaces and graduate students with a basic knowledge of statistics.