Preface

Statistics is the study of data. This ranges from collecting, analyzing, to making conclusions based on the data. Understanding statistics is crucial if you work with any type of research that uses data. This book presents a short and gentle introduction to statistics. You will learn some (i) basic concepts about data and their summaries, (ii) statistical tools to analyze them, and (iii) how to implement them in R.

The book will be helpful for those of you who just get started, as well as those who want to have a better and more systematic understanding. In writing the book, as well as in writing the lecture notes, I try to present the ideas as clear as possible with examples and thought exercises included throughout the chapters. The book is intended to help you build and strengthen your statistical knowledge from square one by presenting basic solutions to several fundamental statistical problems. Although the book can be quite simple, I hope it will still inspire you to go further and explore more about the broad field of statistics.

Acknowledgement: The book closely follows my lecture notes for AFM 113 at University of Waterloo. I would like to thank Ms. Dina Dawoud for helping me build structure of the lecture notes, and hence this book.