Description: Aimed at demystifying probability theory, this text provides a brief and non-technical introduction to the subject. Employing few formulas, author Tamas Rudas uses intuitive but precise descriptions and examples to explain procedures in probability as a springboard for understanding the concepts of expectation, variance, continuous distributions, normal distribution, chi-squared distribution, and the applications of probability theory in research practice. This book gives researchers and students a solid foundation for understanding probability, and can serve as a supplement in general statistics courses.
Brief description: Tamas Rudas is the Head of the Department of Statistics and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) in Budapest. He is also the Academic Director of the TARKI Social Research Centre. His main research area is statistics and its applications in the social sciences, especially the analysis of categorical data. He has published his work in many theoretical, applied, and methodological journals, including Annals of Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Sociological Methodology, Communication in Statistics, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, and Quality and Quantity. Dr. Rudas is also the author of Odds Ratios in the Analysis of Contingency Tables (Sage, 1998).