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Naked Statistics Review: The following is a review of the book Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan (Twitter here). Also follow us on Twitter here!
Naked Statistics Review
Considered strange, tedious, and counter-intuitive by many, the field of statistics is quickly becoming one of the most sexy fields of the 21st century, in part thanks to the amazing advances in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, which have statistics at their very core.
Aside from these techy fields, statistics allow us to answer questions like
- How can we catch schools that cheat on standarised tests?
- How does Netflix know which movies you will like?
- What is causing the rising incidence of autism?
- How likely is it that it will rain tomorrow?
As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. This book strips away most of the math and technical details behind statistics and makes us understand it with easy, everyday example and highly intuitive explanations.
It addresses inference, correlation, regression analysis, or bias in ways which will remove your fear from these topics and make you understand them in a way in which you will never forget. Every page out of its more than 300 pages (way smaller and faster read than a standard statistics text book) is fun, eye-opening, and inspiring, striping away the superfluous outer garments and exposes the underlying beauty of the subject in a way that everyone can appreciate.
Summary of Naked Statistics
Overall, the the book is a well written, funny, and easy to read introduction to statistics, that makes the subject available to everybody, even those who are just interested and have no previous knowledge of the topic. It is, from our point of view, one of the best statistics for beginners books out there. You can find it on amazon here:
- Wheelan, Charles (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 282 Pages - 01/13/2014 (Publication Date) - W. W. Norton & Company (Publisher)
That aside, don’t expect to really learn statistics by reading this alone. It will serve you as an introduction in order to take the fear away from the field, but to really dive deep you will need other texts or material, but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with all of this material:
- Medium post with plain concise definitions of the main terms of probability needed to understand this post and many others with some illustrative and easy examples.
- Fun little introduction to probability in Machine Learning and the main with a mysterious but easy example where each of the main terms of probability are introduced.
- Harvard’s Statistics 110 course. This is a larger resource, in case you don’t only want to learn the fundamentals, but dive deeper into the wonderful world of statistics.
- Probability for the enthusiastic beginner: A great book which we have reviewed in our site.
- Bayesian statistics the fun way: another awesome book which we have reviewed, with great, easy examples to teach you all the fundamentals of bayesian statistics.
- Our great section of Statistics and Probability online courses. Check it out!
Tags: Naked Statistics Review, Statistics Book, Naked Statistics Wheelan, Statistics and Probability, Naked Statistics Amazon, Statistics for Beginners.