Rudolf Dutter - Böcker

Few books on statistical data analysis in the natural sciences are written at a level that a non-statistician will easily understand. This is a book written in colloquial language, avoiding mathematical formulae as much as possible, trying to explain statistical methods using examples and graphics instead. To use the book efficiently, readers should have some computer experience. The book starts with the simplest of statistical concepts and carries readers forward to a deeper and more extensive understanding of the use of statistics in environmental sciences. The book concerns the application of statistical and other computer methods to the management, analysis and display of spatial data. These data are characterised by including locations (geographic coordinates), which leads to the necessity of using maps to display the data and the results of the statistical methods. Although the book uses examples from applied geochemistry, and a large geochemical survey in particular, the principles and ideas equally well apply to other natural sciences, e.g., environmental sciences, pedology, hydrology, geography, forestry, ecology, and health sciences/epidemiology.The book is unique because it supplies direct access to software solutions (based on R, the Open Source version of the S-language for statistics) for applied environmental statistics. For all graphics and tables presented in the book, the R-scripts are provided in the form of executable R-scripts. In addition, a graphical user interface for R, called DAS+R, was developed for convenient, fast and interactive data analysis.Statistical Data Analysis Explained: Applied Environmental Statistics with R provides, on an accompanying website, the software to undertake all the procedures discussed, and the data employed for their description in the book.

Aspects of Robust Statistics are important in many areas. Based on the International Conference on Robust Statistics 2001 (ICORS 2001) in Vorau, Austria, this volume discusses future directions of the discipline, bringing together leading scientists, experienced researchers and practitioners, as well as younger researchers. The papers cover a multitude of different aspects of Robust Statistics. For instance, the fundamental problem of data summary (weights of evidence) is considered and its robustness properties are studied. Further theoretical subjects include e.g.: robust methods for skewness, time series, longitudinal data, multivariate methods, and tests. Some papers deal with computational aspects and algorithms. Finally, the aspects of application and programming tools complete the volume.

This book assembles papers which were presented at the biennial sympo­ sium in Computational Statistics held und er the a!uspices of the International Association for Statistical Computing (IASC), a section of ISI, the Interna­ tional Statistical Institute. This symposium named COMPSTAT '94 was organized by the Statistical Institutes of the University of Vienna and the University of Technology of Vienna, Austria. The series of COMPSTAT Symposia started 1974 in Vienna. Mean­ while they took place every other year in Berlin (Germany, 1976), Leiden (The Netherlands, 1978), Edinburgh (Great Britain, 1980), Toulouse (France, 1982), Prague (Czechoslovakia, 1984), Rom (Italy, 1986), Copenhagen (Den­ mark, 1988), Dubrovnik (Yugoslavia, 1990) and Neuchätel (Switzerland, 1992). This year we are celebrating the 20th anniversary in Vienna, Austria. It has obviously been observed a movement from "traditional" computa­ tional statistics with emphasis on methods which produce results quickly and reliably, to computationally intensive methods like resampling procedures, Bayesian methods, dynamic graphics, to very recent areas like neural net­ works, accentuation on spatial statistics, huge data sets, analysis strategies, etc. For the organization of the symposium, new guidelines worked out by the IASC in written form were in effect this time. The goal was to refresh somehow the spirit of the start of COMPSTAT '74, keep the tradition of the series and ensure a certain continuity in the sequence of biannual meetings.