About

Welcome to the stats book!

Why this book?

As a graduate student and postdoc in the life sciences, I saw that many of my colleauges had substantial training and experience in quantitative methods. They were very able to hack together sensible ways to approach their statistical problems. I found, however, that there was often a steep drop-off in their ability to apply statistical rigor to these ad hoc methods.

I think this gap between the ability to hack something together and the understanding to make something rigorous is partly born out of a gap in educational materials. There are plenty of introductory statistics textbooks that explain what a mean is. There are also plenty of statistical test cookbooks that well you what assumptions are made when using a \(t\)-test. And finally, there are plenty of books and articles on statistics meants for people with a graduate-level education in statistics or math. However, there are few resources for people who are mature and shrewd quantitative thinkers but who do not have a half dozen statistics courses under their belt.

To me, this situation is analogous to when I tried to learn a foreign language as an adult. It was easy for me to find books written for children. These books are at my reading level in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but they are thematically boring. On the other hand, books for adults are thematically interesting but completely intractable in terms of vocabulary and grammar. I wanted to write a book about statistics that is thematically and "gramatically" appropriate.

I am not a statistician, and this is not a book for people who want to push the boundaries of what statisticians think are interesting problems. It is also not a cookbook that tells you what statistical test to run on your data. There are plenty of those already. Instead, my goal is to give you the ability to reason about why to do a statistical test and how to formulate your own. Rather than telling you which steps to generate a \(p\)-value in a specific case, I show how \(p\)-values come about in general and how to derive them for specific cases.

I hope you find it useful!