This book is in two volumes, and is intended as a text for introductory
courses in probability and statistics at the second or third year
university level. It em- phasizes applications and logical principles
rather than mathematical theory. A good background in freshman calculus
is sufficient for most of the material presented. Several starred
sections have been included as supplementary material. Nearly 900
problems and exercises of varying difficulty are given, and Appendix A
contains answers to about one-third of them. The first volume (Chapters
1-8) deals with probability models and with math- ematical methods for
describing and manipulating them. It is similar in content and
organization to the 1979 edition. Some sections have been rewritten and
expanded-for example, the discussions of independent random variables
and conditional probability. Many new exercises have been added. In the
second volume (Chapters 9-16), probability models are used as the basis
for the analysis and interpretation of data. This material has been
revised extensively. Chapters 9 and 10 describe the use of the
likelihood function in estimation problems, as in the 1979 edition.
Chapter 11 then discusses frequency properties of estimation procedures,
and introduces coverage probability and confidence intervals. Chapter 12
describes tests of significance, with applications primarily to
frequency data. The likelihood ratio statistic is used to unify the
material on testing, and connect it with earlier material on estimation.