PART G
obability,
Statistics
Probability theory (Chap. 24) provides models of probability distributions (theoretical models of the observable reality involving chance effects) to be tested by statistical methods, and it will also supply the mathematical foundation of these methods in Chap. 25.
Modern mathematical statistics (Chap. 25) has various engineering applications, for instance, in testing materials, control of production processes, quality control of production outputs, performance tests of systems, robotics, and automatization in general, production planning, marketing analysis, and so on.
To this we could add a long list of fields of applications, for instance, in agriculture, biology, computer science, demography, economics, geography, management of natural resources, medicine, meteorology, politics, psychology, sociology, traffic control, urban planning, etc. Although these applications are very heterogeneous, we shall see that most statistical methods are universal in the sense that each of them can be applied in various fields.
Additional Software for
Probability and Statistics
See also the list of software at the beginning of Part E on Numerical Analysis.
Data Desk. Data Description, Inc., Ithaca, NY. Phone 1-800-573-5121 or (607) 257-1000, website at www.datadesk.com.
MINITAB. Minitab, Inc., State College, PA. Phone 1-800-448-3555 or (814) 238-3280, website at www.minitab.com.
SAS. SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, NC. Phone 1-800-727-0025 or (919) 677-8000, website at www.sas.com.
R. website at www.r-project.org. Free software, part of the GNU/Free Software Foundation project.
SPSS. SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL. (part of IBM) Phone 1-800-543-2185 or (312) 651-3000, website at www.spss.com.
STATISTICA. StatSoft, Inc., Tulsa, OK. Phone (918) 749-1119, website at www.statsoft.com.
TIBCO Spotfire S+. TIBCO Software Inc., Palo Alto, CA; Office for this software: Somerville, MA. Phone 1-866-240-0491 (toll-free), (617) 702-1602, website at spotfire.tibco.com/products/s-plus/statistical-analysis-software.aspx