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This HTML version of "Think Stats 2e" is provided for convenience, but it is not the best format for the book. In particular, some of the math symbols are not rendered correctly.

You might prefer to read the PDF version, or you can buy a hard copy from Amazon.

Chapter 0  Preface

Think Stats is an introduction to the practical tools of exploratory data analysis. The organization of the book follows the process I use when I start working with a dataset:

This book takes a computational approach, which has several advantages over mathematical approaches:

I wrote this book assuming that the reader is familiar with core Python, including object-oriented features, but not pandas, NumPy, and SciPy.

I assume that the reader knows basic mathematics, including logarithms, for example, and summations. I refer to calculus concepts in a few places, but you don’t have to do any calculus.

If you have never studied statistics, I think this book is a good place to start. And if you have taken a traditional statistics class, I hope this book will help repair the damage.

To demonstrate my approach to statistical analysis, the book presents a case study that runs through all of the chapters. It uses data from two sources:

Other examples use data from the IRS, the U.S. Census, and the Boston Marathon.

This second edition of Think Stats includes the chapters from the first edition, many of them substantially revised, and new chapters on regression, time series analysis, survival analysis, and analytic methods. The previous edition did not use pandas, SciPy, or StatsModels, so all of that material is new.

0.1  How I wrote this book

When people write a new textbook, they usually start by reading a stack of old textbooks. As a result, most books contain the same material in pretty much the same order.

I did not do that. In fact, I used almost no printed material while I was writing this book, for several reasons:

The resource I used more than any other is Wikipedia. In general, the articles I read on statistical topics were very good (although I made a few small changes along the way). I include references to Wikipedia pages throughout the book and I encourage you to follow those links; in many cases, the Wikipedia page picks up where my description leaves off. The vocabulary and notation in this book are generally consistent with Wikipedia, unless I had a good reason to deviate. Other resources I found useful were Wolfram MathWorld and the Reddit statistics forum, http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics.

0.2  Using the code

The code and data used in this book are available from http://allendowney.github.io/ThinkStats2/.

The easiest way to work with this code it to run it on Colab, which is a free service that runs Jupyter notebooks in a web browser. For every chapter, I provide two notebooks: one contains the code from the chapter and the exercises; the other also contains the solutions.

If you want to run these notebooks on your own computer, you can downloads them individually from GitHub or download the entire repository from https://github.com/AllenDowney/ThinkStats2/archive/refs/heads/master.zip.

I developed this book using Anaconda from Continuum Analytics, which is a free Python distribution that includes all the packages you’ll need to run the code (and lots more). I found Anaconda easy to install. By default it does a user-level installation, so you don’t need administrative privileges. You can download Anaconda from http://continuum.io/downloads.

If you don’t want to use Anaconda, you will need the following packages:

Although these are commonly used packages, they are not included with all Python installations, and they can be hard to install in some environments. If you have trouble installing them, I strongly recommend using Anaconda or one of the other Python distributions that include these packages.

Allen B. Downey is a Professor of Computer Science at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA.

Contributor List

If you have a suggestion or correction, please send email to downey@allendowney.com. If I make a change based on your feedback, I will add you to the contributor list (unless you ask to be omitted).

If you include at least part of the sentence the error appears in, that makes it easy for me to search. Page and section numbers are fine, too, but not quite as easy to work with. Thanks!

Other people who found typos and similar errors are Andrew Heine, Gábor Lipták, Dan Kearney, Alexander Gryzlov, Martin Veillette, Haitao Ma, Jeff Pickhardt, Rohit Deshpande, Joanne Pratt, Lucian Ursu, Paul Glezen, Ting-kuang Lin, Scott Miller, Luigi Patruno.


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