Preface
Audience
This is an introductory textbook in applied statistics and probability for undergraduate students in engineering and the natural sciences. It begins at a level suitable for those with no previous exposure to probability and statistics and carries the reader through to a level of proficiency in various techniques of statistics. This text is divided into two parts: Part I discusses descriptive statistics, concepts of probability, probability distributions, sampling distributions, estimation, and testing of hypotheses, and Part II discusses various topics of applied statistics, including some reliability theory, statistical quality control charts of phase I and phase II, some nonparametric techniques, categorical data analysis, simple and multiple linear regression analysis, design and analysis of variance with emphasis on 2k factorial designs, and response surface methodology.
This text is suitable for a one- or two-semester undergraduate course sequence. The presentation of material gives instructors a lot of flexibility to pick and choose topics they feel should make up the coverage of material for their courses. However, we feel that in the first course for engineers and science majors, one may cover Chapters 1 and 2, a brief discussion of probability in Chapter 3, selected discrete and continuous distributions from Chapters 4 and 5 with more emphasis on normal distribution, Chapters 7 through 9, and couple of topics from Part II that meet the needs and interests ...
