Understanding Data: A 21st Century Approach to Statistics and Data Science

Textbook by Alan Garfinkel and Yina Guo”…introduces statistics to beginning students in a distinctly original and non-traditional way. It assumes minimal mathematical or statistical background, yet offers substantial depth that will also engage experienced practitioners. Motivated by the growing call to move beyond the statistical practices and concepts that contributed to the current “reproducibility crisis,” the book encourages readers to rethink what statistics is, how it is used, and how it should be taught. Instead of memorizing formulas that were derived as approximations under unrealistic assumptions, modern computing enables us to simulate scenarios thousands of times in seconds and simply count outcomes.
Taking this computational approach as fundamental, the book provides thorough coverage of the material, including describing and presenting data, two-group and multi-group comparisons, correlation, regression, statistical power and Bayesianism, deliberately forgoing many standard techniques in favor of simulation-based methods. This philosophy is gaining momentum…(More)”.