3 Books

One of the more memorable questions I was asked when on the job market last year was “If you were stranded on a deserted island with only three statistics books, what would they be?”. (I’m not making this up.) If I were actually in that incredibly unlikely and bizarre situation, the best thing would probably be to just choose the three biggest books out there, in case I needed them for a fire or something. I’m pretty sure there’s no tenure clock on deserted islands. But I digress. What I said was:

1. Gelman, Carlin, Stern, and Rubin (Bayesian Data Analysis)
2. The Rice Book (Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis, John Rice)
3. Muttered something about maybe a survey sampling book and quickly changed the subject.

If anyone ever asks me that again, I think I’ll change Number 3 to Cox’s The Planning of Experiments.

2 thoughts on “3 Books

  1. I'm sorry that you have to inhabit a world full of many people less smart than yourself, but you do. And unfortunately, journalists have to write for that whole world (in theory, anyway).

    Until the words "regression analysis" enter the vernacular, you're probably going to have to put up with them being left out of stories. But I think you're right that journalists should be more specific about how they analyze anything, even if they don't use technical vocabularly.

  2. I'm also fond of the Rice book. I wish that it were used in my early statistics classes rather than whatever book I used and already forgot about. Another I would nominate as a possible third is Christensen's Plane Answers to Complex Questions.

    But assuming I didn't have a computer on the island for data analysis and was looking for something primarily to occupy my thoughts, nothing beats Feller's An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications for great examples and tough questions. That probably doesn't count as a statistics book.

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