This book offers a broad selection of statistical applications to everyday situations, illustrating how exciting and diverse statistical analysis can be. It covers a wide variety of topics, including offering hearing-impaired people the option to enjoy music, extracting meaningful quantitative data from texts, and modeling flood disasters to help get a better grip on them. Most of the examples are not typically found in textbooks but directly relate to real-life problems encountered by the average person, including topics relevant for sustainable development.
Technical jargon and formalism have been avoided as much as possible, and a detailed statistical background is not assumed of the reader, making the book accessible to anyone interested in current research in statistical applications. Providing an unobscured look at a thoroughly fascinating science, it will help students to develop enthusiasm for statistical issues and methods, and may even inspire ideas for their own projects.
Preface.- Part I Human Life, Medicine, and Genetics.- Season of birth
and human longevity: A new theory why children born in November live longer.-
Where do drugs work in the body? A systematic statistical data analysis.-
Drug studies: Using statistics to achieve the optimal dose.- Statistical
alarm systems in intensive care medicine.- Personalized medicine: How
statistics helps not to drown in the flood of data.- Modulating genetic
effects on bladder cancer risk in an area of coal, iron, and steel
industries.- Statistics and the maximum human lifespan.- Part II Sports and
Entertainment.- Statistics and soccer.- The players anxiety at the penalty
kick: Who is the best penalty taker, who the best goalkeeper?.- Music data
analysis.- Statistics and horse race betting favorites vs. longshots.- The
statistics of the German 6/49 lotto.- Part III Money and Business.-
Statistics at the stock exchange.- Statistics in the risk assessment of bank
portfolios.- On rating the raters: Statistics in the rating industry.- Gross
domestic product, greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming.- Part IV
Nature and Technology.- Flood statistics: Still on the river bank or already
in the water?.- How statistics helps to reduce rejects.- Statistics and
reliability of technical products.- Durable machine components: How
statistical design of experiments optimizes wear protection.- Part V
Intricacies of Measurement.- Measuring the immeasurable: Statistics,
intelligence, and education.- Uncovering embarrassing truths through
statistics.- Samples and missing data.- Part VI Language Data.- Who is
supposed to read all this? Automatic analysis of text data.- Statistical
modeling of current linguistic realities around the world: The case of
Singapore.- Linguistic manifestations of cultural differences across
national varieties of English a methodological survey.- Part VII From Here
to Where?.- Isdata science more than statistics? The bigger picture.
Prof. Dr. Claus Weihs worked as a statistical consultant at Ciba-Geigy in Switzerland for more than 9 years before joining the Statistics Department of Dortmund University as a professor of Computational Statistics. After holding the chair for 25 years, he is now Professor Emeritus. His areas of expertise are statistical classification, statistics in engineering, and the statistical analysis of music data and linguistic data.
Prof. Dr. Walter Krämer has held the chair for Business and Economic Statistics at the Statistics Department of Dortmund University for 30 years. He is the author of numerous popular texts on the use and abuse of statistics and is currently engaged in the initiative Unstatistik des Monats (Bad Statistic of the Month) to check media coverage of statistical results.
Prof. Dr. Sarah Buschfeld is a full professor of English Linguistics (Multilingualism) at Dortmund University, after previous appointments at the universities of Regensburg and Cologne. She has worked and published on a number of linguistic topics and disciplines, including postcolonial and non-postcolonial varieties of English and the field of language acquisition and multilingualism.