The Art of Statistics
by David Spiegelhalter · first published 2019
11mentions
7recommended by
11HN commenters
2019–2026first – last mentioned
64% recommend36% neutral
Why HN recommends it
An accessible, example-driven introduction to statistical thinking and inference, with a clear treatment of absolute versus relative risk and how to reason about data. Suited to general readers new to statistics.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…livelihoods. I think that people developing machine learning models sometimes don't think about the consequences of the false positives enough. There is a great section in David Spiegelhalter's book The Art of Statistics which got me thinking about this.
on “Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs” ↗…new literature to me and prepare the ground for approaching those books by explaining the content and critically analysing it. Statistical literacy also helps - for this I've read David Spiegelhalter's Art of Statistics, which is for the lay reader. News-wise, single generally credible sources are hard to come by. The Guardian does good live blogs, especially on UK parliamentary debates. The New York Times has a solid…
on “Ask HN: How do you find credible information online?” ↗…Fry https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp... Do Dice Play God?: The Mathematics of Uncertainty - Ian Stewart https://www.amazon.com/Dice-Play-God-Mathematics-Uncertainty... The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data - David Spiegelhalter https://www.amazon.com/Art-Statistics-How-Learn-Data/dp/1541...
on “What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves” ↗…which has a mission of improving the public's understanding of uncertainty but appears to be a lapsed project. One member of the project team is David Spiegelhalter, who is still writing. His book "The Art of Statistics" is an excellent book on the craft of inference. [0] https://mucollective.northwestern.edu/ [1] https://twitter.com/JessicaHullman [2] https://understandinguncertainty.org/
on “Understanding uncertainty: Visualising probabilities” ↗Darrell Huff - How To Lie With Statistics[0]. And the first chapter or two of David Spiegelhalter - The Art of Statistics[1] has a good example of absolute vs relative rates/probabilities with respect to medicine. Pretty basic an important issue to understand. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51291.How_to_Lie_with_St... [1]…
on “As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey finds” ↗I highly recommend The Art of Statistics. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43722897-the-art-of-stat...
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite book for learning statistics?” ↗…general reader, two books by David Spiegelhalter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spiegelhalter) are relevant here; 1) The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck. 2) The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data. And of course, all the books by Nassim Taleb.
on “Six Math Essentials” ↗I am reading "The Art of Statistics" by David Spiegelhalter.
on “Ask HN: What kind of math do you study in your free time?” ↗Book review of The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data Hardcoverby David Spiegelhalter. Not on goodreads yet so the Amazon link is below. To be released on September 3, 2019. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Statistics-How-Learn-Data/dp/1541...
on “The Joy of Statistics” ↗…kaggle.com runs machine learning competitions, one of which is "Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster" [0]. I haven't looked into the site myself; I learned about it from David Spiegelhalter's book "The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data" [1]. The competition's problem of predicting who would have survived the disaster provides much of the motivation for the chapter "Algorithms, Analytics and Prediction". In that…
on “Show HN: Would You Survive the Titanic?” ↗Essentialism How to take Smart Notes Designing your life Atomic Habits Thinking Fast and Slow Art of statistics
on “Ask HN: Books you plan to read in 2021?” ↗