Larsen And Marx An Introduction To Mathematical Statistics Pdf

1,409 reviews 43 followers

April 15, 2017

A well-done book on statistics that includes all the theorems I can think of. Goes into situations and proofs that require Calculus, but that isn't really a big deal.

The book is pretty standard, though I don't know how good MINITAB is since I have neither used nor heard of it. Apparently, it is a statistics package. Then again, I suppose I could modify it for SciPy or something along those lines.

In any case, this book is really good at explaining things. My only problem is that my grounding in Calculus is so tenuous that I don't really have a grasp of the proofs presented. All I can do is smile and nod at the results. So I probably need to go back to Calculus and try to learn that on my own.

mathematics

textbooks

9 reviews 1 follower

Edited October 18, 2012

Terrible. Doesn't explain the mathematics indepth, and is poor at giving an intuitive understanding of statistics. One of the worst textbooks I have had the displeasure of reading.

11 reviews

December 9, 2019

This probably should be a four-star(-plus) rating because the stats section was a bit underwhelming and felt a bit rushed---the LaTeX formatting, too, was a bit unwieldily and inelegant in various spots---but I rounded up due to the wonderful chapters on probability, the quality of the examples/test cases, the clear exposition, and the proofs. I've read Rosanov and a bunch of other texts on probability theory, but Larsen and Marx's tome does more than enough to make room for itself. I can't remember the last time I read a textbook where the marriage between theory and practice was so effective, immediate, entertaining, and illuminating. This is its unshirted achievement.

Yes, you need the (basic elements of the) machinery of calculus to understand what's happening in the first 2/3 of the book, but its inaccessibility to beginners and casual readers is counterbalanced by what it offers those prepared to engage the material. If you're interested in the mathematics of probability (or you're taking stats with a heavy probability component), this would be a fine companion text to supplement your learning.

mathematics