Ask HN: Good book about statistics and probability? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good book about statistics and probability?

24 pointslpman12 comments

I just finsihed "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg. It's an amazing book. Now I'm looking for a book to read next. I was thinking about "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't" by Nate Silver. Any better suggestions?

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Based on the books mentioned in your post, I assume you are looking for light readings on statistics and probability. You might enjoy following books.

* Darrell Huff, Irving Geis How to Lie With Statistics

* Ian Ayres Super Crunchers Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart

* David Salsburg The Lady Tasting Tea How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

* Emanuel Deman, Models Behaving Badly

* Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson The Misbehavior of Markets A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence

* Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

"How To Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff. It's a pretty old book (1954). But it talks about the most common uses of statistics in everyday life (marketing reasearch and infographics showing extrapolating trends inaccurately) and how the results are often gathered carelessly. Here's a short review by Bill Gates: http://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/How-to-Lie-with-Statistics

Get "Introduction to Probability" by Dmitri Bertsekas. The solutions are available on the web also, so it makes it easy to work through the problems until you get it.

There's other good books out there, but I still keep the Bertsekas book on my desk, along with Kutner's Applied Linear Regression Models.

Very good choice.I have read "Introduction to Probability" for a course on my EE school.Gives pretty solid intuition for the fundamental concepts and going through the exercises gives you a more than working knowledge on the subject.They range from simple applications to stimulating puzzles.Definitely give it a try!

The Nate Silver book is outstanding. Read it. I would then think about one of Nassim Taleb's books, either "The Black Swan" or "Antifragile".

I would like to add 'Introduction of Probability' by Joseph K. Blitzstein, Jessica Hwang. I actually have not used the textbook yet but I have taken Prof. Blitzstein's Harvard Stat 110 and it has been the best of all online courses I have taken for statistics. I have also heard very good things about the book. Worth checking out.

The problem sets for the course are available free online. So you can have a look at them to decide.

Well I was going to suggest several textbooks but they are all $250 now. Are you interested in just popular math?

Could you share your suggestions.

Yeah just the books I used in school: Ross - A First Course in Probability Rice - Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis Casella - Statistical Inference

Thank you.

Are you a data scientist? BTW, which school did you graduate from?

I am currently learning statistics and machine learning and want to find a better way to do so, i.e. better. I have a good mathematical background, but mostly outside of statistics though I had a good course in probability theory.

I'm a software engineer, currently unemployed. I graduated from a smaller engineering school in the US in Math. Yeah, 15 weeks or so of probability and 15 weeks of statistics. Hardcore professors were a good way to learn. I almost want to do another program to see if other schools have the same type of sadistic professors.

Statistics without Tears is a good read. It makes use of very simple examples to explain the concepts.

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