This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts. A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance. Other challenges that emerge from this book include a better understanding of the contextuality and perspectival character of chance (including its scale-dependence), and the curious fact that, throughout history (including contemporary science), chance has been used both as an explanation and as a hallmark of the absence of explanation. As such, this book challenges the reader to think about chance in a new way and to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating phenomenon.

Essential Methods for Design Based Sample Surveys presents key method contributions selected from the volume in the Handbook of Statistics: Sample Surveys: Design, Methods and Applications, Vol. 29a (2009). This essential reference provides specific aspects of sample survey design, with references to important contributions and available software. The content is aimed at researchers and practitioners who use statistical methods in design based sample surveys and market research. This book presents the core essential methods of sample selection and data processing. The data processing discussion covers editing and imputation, and methods of disclosure control. This reference contains a large variety of applications in specialized areas such as household and business surveys, marketing research, opinion polls and censuses.

When it comes to data collection and analysis, ranked set sampling (RSS) continues to increasingly be the focus of methodological research. This type of sampling is an alternative to simple random sampling and can offer substantial improvements in precision and efficient estimation. There are different methods within RSS that can be further explored and discussed. On top of being efficient, RSS is cost-efficient and can be used in situations where sample units are difficult to obtain. With new results in modeling and applications, and a growing importance in theory and practice, it is essential for modeling to be further explored and developed through research. Ranked Set Sampling Models and Methods presents an innovative look at modeling survey sampling research and new models of RSS along with the future potentials of it. The book provides a panoramic view of the state of the art of RSS by presenting some previously known and new models. The chapters illustrate how the modeling is to be developed and how they improve the efficiency of the inferences. The chapters highlight topics such as bootstrap methods, fuzzy weight ranked set sampling method, item count technique, stratified ranked set sampling, and more. This book is essential for statisticians, social and natural science scientists, physicians and all the persons involved with the use of sampling theory in their research along with practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the latest models and methods for ranked set sampling.

This book grew out of the notes for a one-semester basic graduate course in probability. As the title suggests, it is meant to be an introduction to probability and could serve as textbook for a year long text for a basic graduate course. It assumes some familiarity with measure theory and integration so in this book we emphasize only those aspects of measure theory that have special probabilistic uses.The book covers the topics that are part of the culture of an aspiring probabilist and it is guided by the author's personal belief that probability was and is a theory driven by examples. The examples form the main attraction of this subject. For this reason, a large book is devoted to an eclectic collection of examples, from classical to modern, from mainstream to 'exotic'. The text is complemented by nearly 200 exercises, quite a few nontrivial, but all meant to enhance comprehension and enlarge the reader's horizons.While teaching probability both at undergraduate and graduate level the author discovered the revealing power of simulations. For this reason, the book contains a veiled invitation to the reader to familiarize with the programing language R. In the appendix, there are a few of the most frequently used operations and the text is sprinkled with (less than optimal) R codes. Nowadays one can do on a laptop simulations and computations we could only dream as an undergraduate in the past. This is a book written by a probability outsider. That brings along a bit of freshness together with certain 'naiveties'.

Biostatistics and Computer-Based Analysis of Health Data Using the R Software addresses the concept that many of the actions performed by statistical software comes back to the handling, manipulation, or even transformation of digital data. It is therefore of primary importance to understand how statistical data is displayed and how it can be exploited by software such as R. In this book, the authors explore basic and variable commands, sample comparisons, analysis of variance, epidemiological studies, and censored data. With proposed applications and examples of commands following each chapter, this book allows readers to apply advanced statistical concepts to their own data and software.

Data Gathering, Analysis and Protection of Privacy through Randomized Response Techniques: Qualitative and Quantitative Human Traits tackles how to gather and analyze data relating to stigmatizing human traits. S.L. Warner invented RRT and published it in JASA, 1965. In the 50 years since, the subject has grown tremendously, with continued growth. This book comprehensively consolidates the literature to commemorate the inception of RR.

Due to the scale and complexity of data sets currently being collected in areas such as health, transportation, environmental science, engineering, information technology, business and finance, modern quantitative analysts are seeking improved and appropriate computational and statistical methods to explore, model and draw inferences from big data. This book aims to introduce suitable approaches for such endeavours, providing applications and case studies for the purpose of demonstration. Computational and Statistical Methods for Analysing Big Data with Applications starts with an overview of the era of big data. It then goes onto explain the computational and statistical methods which have been commonly applied in the big data revolution. For each of these methods, an example is provided as a guide to its application. Five case studies are presented next, focusing on computer vision with massive training data, spatial data analysis, advanced experimental design methods for big data, big data in clinical medicine, and analysing data collected from mobile devices, respectively. The book concludes with some final thoughts and suggested areas for future research in big data.

The Birnbaum-Saunders Distribution presents the statistical theory, methodology, and applications of the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution, a very flexible distribution for modeling different types of data (mainly lifetime data). The book describes the most recent theoretical developments of this model, including properties, transformations and related distributions, lifetime analysis, and shape analysis. It discusses methods of inference based on uncensored and censored data, goodness-of-fit tests, and random number generation algorithms for the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution, also presenting existing and future applications.

Rare event probability (10-4 and less) estimation has become a large area of research in the reliability engineering and system safety domains. A significant number of methods have been proposed to reduce the computation burden for the estimation of rare events from advanced sampling approaches to extreme value theory. However, it is often difficult in practice to determine which algorithm is the most adapted to a given problem. Estimation of Rare Event Probabilities in Complex Aerospace and Other Systems: A Practical Approach provides a broad up-to-date view of the current available techniques to estimate rare event probabilities described with a unified notation, a mathematical pseudocode to ease their potential implementation and finally a large spectrum of simulation results on academic and realistic use cases.

An Introduction to Stochastic Orders discusses this powerful tool that can be used in comparing probabilistic models in different areas such as reliability, survival analysis, risks, finance, and economics. The book provides a general background on this topic for students and researchers who want to use it as a tool for their research. In addition, users will find detailed proofs of the main results and applications to several probabilistic models of interest in several fields, and discussions of fundamental properties of several stochastic orders, in the univariate and multivariate cases, along with applications to probabilistic models.

Featuring previously unpublished results, Semi-Markov Models: Control of Restorable Systems with Latent Failures describes valuable methodology which can be used by readers to build mathematical models of a wide class of systems for various applications. In particular, this information can be applied to build models of reliability, queuing systems, and technical control. Beginning with a brief introduction to the area, the book covers semi-Markov models for different control strategies in one-component systems, defining their stationary characteristics of reliability and efficiency, and utilizing the method of asymptotic phase enlargement developed by V.S. Korolyuk and A.F. Turbin. The work then explores semi-Markov models of latent failures control in two-component systems. Building on these results, solutions are provided for the problems of optimal periodicity of control execution. Finally, the book presents a comparative analysis of analytical and imitational modeling of some one- and two-component systems, before discussing practical applications of the results