Elementary Bayesian Statistics is a thorough and easily accessible introduction to the theory and practical application of Bayesian statistics. It presents methods to assist in the collection, summary and presentation of numerical data.Bayesian statistics are becoming an increasingly important and more frequently used method for analysing statistical data. The author defines concepts and methods with a variety of examples and uses a stage-by-stage approach to coach the reader through the applied examples. Also included are a wide range of problems to challenge the reader and the book makes extensive use of Minitab to apply computational techniques to statistical problems. Issues covered include probability, Bayes's Theorem and categorical states, frequency, the Bernoulli process and Poisson process, estimation, testing hypotheses and the normal process with known parameters and uncertain parameters. Elementary Bayesian Statistics will be an essential resource for students as a supplementary text in traditional statistics courses. It will also be welcomed by academics, researchers and econometricians wishing to know more about Bayesian statistics.

The first course in statistics, no matter how "good" or "long" it is, typically covers inferential procedures which are valid only if a number of preconditions are satisfied by the data. For example, students are taught about regression procedures valid only if the true residuals are independent, homoscedastic, and normally distributed. But they do not learn how to check for indepen dence, homoscedasticity, or normality, and certainly do not learn how to adjust their data and/or model so that these assumptions are met. To help this student out I designed a second course, containing a collec tion of statistical diagnostics and prescriptions necessary for the applied statistician so that he can deal with the realities of inference from data, and not merely with the kind of classroom problems where all the data satisfy the assumptions associated with the technique to be taught. At the same time I realized that I was writing a book for a wider audience, namely all those away from the classroom whose formal statistics education ended with such a course and who apply statistical techniques to data."