Book review

For people who are not statisticians, they may wonder what statisticians do, and how statistics could be applied in daily life. Statistics: A Guide to the Unknown is a supplementary reading materials designed for general readers even if he or she did not learn enough knowledge of statistics, mathematics and probability. Besides, it could give statisticians a general understanding of the important role of statistics in society. This book also analyzes how statistics assists people to gain useful information from massive data sets. In order to form a more respected book, the editors invite many distinguished researchers in statistics as authors. The book consists of twenty-five essays from different fields, including public policy and social science, science and technology, biology and medicine, business and industry, and hobbies and recreation. Each essay provides readers a description of how statistical methods are applied to solve issues in that field.

The book is divided into five parts according to different fields. In first part, five papers are focused on applications of statistical methods in public policy and social science. Hypothesis testing was used to determine the guilty of a suspect in the courtroom. Probability distribution and sampling were used to analyze candidate preference for an election polling. Besides, people applied modeling method to figure out that Utah could get an extra seat in U.S. House of Representatives unless North Carolina lost one seat. In order to evaluate school choice programs, getting quantitative evidence from randomized experiments was easier than from observational studies, though evaluators would deal with missing data and noncompliance. To understand health care spending, a survey was ...

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... This format could guide readers to a more efficient reading. For the readers who have interests in particular methods, they could quickly refer to these two lists and read papers related to those methods. Secondly, within each essay, the content was divided into several parts, and each part is highlighted by a subheading. In addition, transition paragraphs are used appropriately to conclude previous ideas and introduce the author’s next key points. For example, in the middle part of the paper by Cobb and Gehlbach (pp. 3-18), the authors wrote one paragraph to give a detailed summary of what could be illustrated from the first hypothesis testing and briefly introduced what they aimed to do in the second testing. This transition could give readers clearer idea of what kind of information they have obtained and how the paper would develop in the following paragraphs.