52 books like Bayesian Statistics for Beginners

In the ongoing debates over artificial general intelligence (AGI), Judea Pearl is taking a firm stand: He argues that an intelligent robot should be able to reason about causality and that the currently fashionable approaches to AI miss this aspect.

A celebrated AI researcher and a Turing Prize laureate, Pearl has developed an amazingly original approach to this problem. This book is a high-end popular exposition of his approach.

But it’s so much more than that. It’s a history of statistics and its conflicted attitude to causality. It’s a story of heroes (or villains?) in this history. And it’s a scientific autobiography that describes Pearl’s journey. Pearl likes picking fights with the AI community, statisticians, or economists. He’s boastful, provocative, extremely intelligent, and knows how to tell a story.

As I write these lines, artificial intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention.

This is largely due to ChatGpt recently bursting onto the scene. But even before ChatGpt began making its mark, AI was often in the news. Some have expressed worry that it will take our jobs, others that it will reinforce systemic oppression by making racially or otherwise discriminatory decisions, and some have even voiced concerns that one day a superintelligent AI might pose an existential threat to humanity.

In the midst of all this, what might get lost is what AI is, what it's capable of doing, and what its limitations are. Wenger's book is intended to address all of these questions. It manages to do so in a way which goes into some of the mathematics of AI systems and yet remain accessible to a lay audience.

After laying out the technical aspects of AI,… show more.

Jun Otsuka, a philosopher who also has training in statistics, zooms in on their philosophical foundations.

His book discusses the metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic assumptions on which Classical statistics, Bayesian statistics, predictive/classification AI models, and causal inference are based.

For those interested in these disciplines but who're also sensitive to the philosophical issues they raise, Otsuka's book is simply amazing. Run out and get a copy as soon as possible.   

Many people associate mathematics with calculating things or plugging numbers into formulas to get answers to a multitude of problems.

But this isn't how mathematicians view their discipline. They see mathematics as more about starting with definitions of key mathematical concepts, stating axioms about these concepts, and proving things about them. For those interested in going from calculating and plug and chug mathematics to "real" mathematics, Richard Hammack's book is a terrific place to start.

The book covers a number of topics that cut across all of pure and applied mathematics, topics such as sets, relations, and functions. But the heart of the book is focused on how mathematicians go about proving things. If one wants a glimpse of how mathematicians really work, go out and get this book immediately.  

Can you love a book that you disagree with? I do! I love this extravagant account of how Bayesian Statistics was enmired in controversy and, after 200 years, saved everything from Western Civilization to Captain Dreyfus.

I don’t think that Bayesian statistics is the foundation of all rational thought, but I am happy to celebrate all its wonderful achievements. Every page of this book is lively and personal, engrossing, entertaining, masterful…all of that.

The power of unrequited love that seeks no alternative. A knight loves his queen. He gives his life to protect her and is banished from her presence, yet he cannot resist the magic that arranges the world to draw them together.

Evil tries to convince us that it gives the greatest benefit. Sometimes that is temporarily true. I love stories where characters resist and suffer so that they receive the higher benefit of good. I am a musician and the magic of our knight rings true in my soul.

Highly philosophical, spiritual, fantastical, and deeply scientific, this book satisfies on every level.

“Thermodynamics, signal theory, Bayesian inference, inversion, quantum tunneling, and materials science are all elements of the internally consistent system of dynamics.” Lee Hunt

This book, by Nate Silver of 538 fame, explains in a straightforward manner why so many predictions by “experts,” from weather forecasts to sports outcomes to election polling to economics, ultimately prove wrong.

It relates to understanding the “signal,” the underlying science that is often revealed through trends and patterns in data, relative to the “noise,” the random or unpredictable variations always present in data. Silver also explains the concept of conditional probability, probability when provided with some relevant information, in an unusually clear manner.

The book reads more like a casual conversation with the author, rather than a statistics textbook.

Any list of books about science must have something about Darwin. The book to read is The Origin. But that’s obvious. I don’t need to go into it. So here is a Darwin book that is less obvious.

Most scientists will never have heard of it; it’s literary history, not science. I learned of it by accident, in a talk given by an economic historian. This is a fascinating book by a literary historian from which I learned much about Darwin. Gillian Beer recognizes that Darwin was a great writer. She traces similarities between his rhetorical style and the strategies of some other iconic Victorian writers, such as George Eliot (Middlemarch) and Samuel Butler (The way of all flesh).

She also discusses scientific writers of the era such as George Lewis and Herbert Spencer. There are many revealing long quotations. I learned much from the… show more.

“Why most published research findings are false” was a 2005 paper that kicked off a crisis in science about failures to replicate, creating gaping cracks in the bedrock of science. Science Fictions explains this replication crisis and prescribes remedies. The book is written in an entertaining style, which led to its inclusion in the shortlist of the Royal Society Science Book Prize for 2021. Psychology is the poster child for the replication crisis. One of the things I like about genetics is that its findings consistently replicate, beginning with the fundamental finding that about half of the differences between people on psychological traits can be explained by inherited DNA differences.

Yara is a girl with a passion for science who is determined to make new discoveries. The book has educational back matter explaining the scientific method of making new discoveries and lays out each step in the process clearly that young readers can follow. It will inspire children to start experimenting on their own. Like every good scientist, Yara starts with a question, makes observations, and comes up with a hypothesis... but each time she starts an experiment, her dog, Renzo, ruins it! Yara sets a great example for young readers to pursue scientific studies. In this humorous story, there is clear evidence that scientific method works as well for dogs as for people.