Statistics : principles and methods / Giuseppe Cicchitelli, Pierpaolo D'Urso, Marco Minozzo.

1. Basic concepts — 2. Frequency distributions — 3. Describing data by graphs — 4. Central tendency — 5. Variability - 6. Shape of frequency distributions — 7. An overview of descriptive summary statistics — 8. Index numbers — 9. Association in contingency tables — 10. Simple linear regression — 11. Correlation — 12. Probability — 13. Random variables — 14. Some parametric probability distributions — 15. Joint probability distributions — 16. The law of large numbers and the central limit — 17. Random samples and sampling distributions of statistics — 18. Point estimation — 19. Interval estimation — 20. Hypothesis testing — 21. Compating two populations — 22. Hypothesis testing for frequency data — 23. Inference on the simoke regression model — Appendix — Index.

As is customary in introductory statistics textbooks, this book is organized into three parts: descriptive statistics, probability and inferential statistics. Compared to other introductory statistics textbooks, greater attention is paid to descriptive statistics, based on conviction that it is important to provide students with basic knowledge and skills to manage raw data and produce useful summary statistics. Previous knowledge in this area, possible gained at the secondary level, is thus enhanced and systematized, fostering the comprehension of concepts pertaining to probability and inference. Indeed, many properties of frequency distributions have conceptual counterparts in the probability distributions of random variables, and fitting a straight line to a series of bivariate observations (to describe approximately the linear relationship between two variables) is beneficial to the study of the inference on the simple linear regression model. The objective of this book is to develop conceptual comprehension rather than mere knowledge of procedures. For this purpose, concepts aare introduced in an intuitive manner and illustrated through worked examples.