Page 13 - Applied Statistics Using SPSS, STATISTICA, MATLAB and R

Preface to the Second Edition

Four years have passed since the first edition of this book. During this time I have
had the opportunity to apply it in classes obtaining feedback from students and
inspiration for improvements. I have also benefited from many comments by users
of the book. For the present second edition large parts of the book have undergone
major revision, although the basic concept – concise but sufficiently rigorous
mathematical treatment with emphasis on computer applications to real datasets –,
has been retained.
The second edition improvements are as follows:

• Inclusion of R as an application tool. As a matter of fact, R is a free
software product which has nowadays reached a high level of maturity
and is being increasingly used by many people as a statistical analysis
tool.
• Chapter 3 has an added section on bootstrap estimation methods, which
have gained a large popularity in practical applications.

• A revised explanation and treatment of tree classifiers in Chapter 6 with
the inclusion of the QUEST approach.
• Several improvements of Chapter 7 (regression), namely: details
concerning the meaning and computation of multiple and partial
correlation coefficients, with examples; a more thorough treatment and
exemplification of the ridge regression topic; more attention dedicated to
model evaluation.
• Inclusion in the book CD of additional MATLAB functions as well as a
set of R functions.
• Extra examples and exercises have been added in several chapters.
• The bibliography has been revised and new references added.

I have also tried to improve the quality and clarity of the text as well as notation.
Regarding notation I follow in this second edition the more widespread use of
denoting random variables with italicised capital letters, instead of using small
cursive font as in the first edition. Finally, I have also paid much attention to
correcting errors, misprints and obscurities of the first edition.

J.P. Marques de Sá
Porto, 2007