The best statistics books

I’ve been reading baseball annuals and previews since I was a kid and my must-haves were Street & Smith’s Baseball Yearbook and Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball. I was a contributing writer for several years to Ultimate Sports Publishing’s annual baseball magazines, which for a while came close to the old Mazeroski releases. I edited several of Baseball America’s Almanacs when I was on staff there and have written Top 30s for a number of the Prospect Handbooks. I get that everything is available online these days, but there’s something about having it all in one place, locked in for all time, there for reference whenever needed.

I taught for 45 years at Ithaca College broken by two years as Fulbright Professor in West Africa at the University of Liberia. During my years in academia, I developed several new courses including a popular “Math in Africa” class and the first U.S. course for college credit in chess theory. I’ve always had a passion for and continue to have strong interests in (1) national educational and social issues concerning equal access to math education for all and (2) teaching others about the power of mathematics and statistics to help one more deeply understand social issues.

Tim Harford is the author of nine books, including The Undercover Economist and The Data Detective, and the host of the Cautionary Tales podcast. He presents the BBC Radio programs More or Less, Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy, and How To Vaccinate The World. Tim is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, a member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and the only journalist to have been made an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.

I never had a real career. Closest I came was the Air Force Reserve for 27 years. Along the way, I built fighter-vs-fighter computer models for the Defense Department, served as an advisor to a Saudi Air Force prince, led a team that designed a replacement for the Air Force’s A-10 tankbuster (which was never built, unfortunately), sold C-130 transport aircraft in Saudi Arabia, taught statistics in business school, became a yoga instructor, and did PR work in Atlanta. Starting in 1975, I collaborated a little with a retired Air Force colonel, John Boyd, creator of the infamous “OODA loop.” I was never a published author in the US, although I am in India, Portugal, and Japan. 

I’m a historian who’s spent far too much time thinking about how the color magenta contributed to climate change and why eighteenth-century humanitarians were obsessed with tobacco enemas. My favorite historical topics—like sensation, color, and truth—don’t initially seem historical, but that’s exactly why they need to be explored. I’ve learned that the things that seem like second nature are where our deepest cultural assumptions and unconscious biases hide. In addition to writing nonfiction, I’ve been lucky enough to grow up on a ranch, live in Paris, work as an interior design writer, teach high school and college, and help stray dogs get adopted.

I’m an applied statistician and academic researcher/lecturer at New Zealand’s oldest university – the University of Otago. R facilitates everything I do – research, academic publication, and teaching. It’s the latter part of my job that motivated my own book on R. From first-year statistics students who have never seen R to my own Ph.D. students using R to implement novel and highly complex statistical methods and models, my experience is that all ultimately love the ease with which the R language permits exploration, visualisation, analysis, and inference of one’s data. The ever-growing need in today’s society for skilled statisticians and data scientists means there's never been a better time to learn this essential language.

In sixth grade, my teacher tried to teach the class how to read line charts – and something fell into place for me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to sort data into forms that we can use to make sense of it. As a researcher at Microsoft, I consulted with teams across the organization – from sales to legal; and from Excel to XBox – to help them understand their data. At Honeycomb, I design tools for software operations teams to diagnose their complex systems. These books each gave me an “ah-hah” moment that made me think differently about the craft of creating visualization. They now sit on my shelf in easy reach – I hope you find them fascinating too.

When people ask me why I became a statistician, and what its attraction is, I simply tell them that, using statistics, I have been on voyages of discovery and travelled to worlds they didn’t know existed. Using data and statistical methods instead of light and optics, I have seen things others could not imagine. Like an explorer of old, I have joined adventures peeling back the mysteries of the world around us. In my books on statistics, data science, data mining, and artificial intelligence, I have tried to convey some of this excitement, and to show the reader how they too can take part in this wonderful modern adventure.

I grew up listening and participating in discussions about politics. These discussions often ended up on Economics – after all, “it’s the economy, stupid!”. Game theory, by being very broad and focused on strategic interactions, served as a very rewarding unifying apparatus for my understanding of Economics. It is also very beautiful and elegant, combining the austere beauty of pure mathematics with insights from elegant literature – I was pleased to cite Graham Green’s Our Man in Havana in a recent paper. It has accompanied me in a 20-year career since my PhD in Economics at the University of Minnesota to my current professorship in Economics at the University of Surrey.

I've had a long-time interest in two things: mathematics and social issues. This is why I got degrees in social work (Masters) and sociology (PhD) and eventually focused on the quantitative aspects of these two areas. Social Workers Count gave me the chance to marry these two interests by showing the role mathematics can play in illuminating a number of pressing social issues.

I grew up listening and participating in discussions about politics. These discussions often ended up on Economics – after all, “it’s the economy, stupid!”. Game theory, by being very broad and focused on strategic interactions, served as a very rewarding unifying apparatus for my understanding of Economics. It is also very beautiful and elegant, combining the austere beauty of pure mathematics with insights from elegant literature – I was pleased to cite Graham Green’s Our Man in Havana in a recent paper. It has accompanied me in a 20-year career since my PhD in Economics at the University of Minnesota to my current professorship in Economics at the University of Surrey.

I taught for 45 years at Ithaca College broken by two years as Fulbright Professor in West Africa at the University of Liberia. During my years in academia, I developed several new courses including a popular “Math in Africa” class and the first U.S. course for college credit in chess theory. I’ve always had a passion for and continue to have strong interests in (1) national educational and social issues concerning equal access to math education for all and (2) teaching others about the power of mathematics and statistics to help one more deeply understand social issues.

I build and use emerging technological innovations in business, and I also teach others how they might too! I’m a serial entrepreneur and a Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. As an entrepreneur, I co-founded and developed the core IP for Yodle Inc, a venture-backed firm that was acquired by Web.com. I’m now the founder of Jumpcut Media – a startup using data and Web3 technologies to democratize opportunities in Film and TV. In all this work, I'm often trying to assess how emerging technologies may affect business and society in the long run and how I can apply them to create new products and services.

In sixth grade, my teacher tried to teach the class how to read line charts – and something fell into place for me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to sort data into forms that we can use to make sense of it. As a researcher at Microsoft, I consulted with teams across the organization – from sales to legal; and from Excel to XBox – to help them understand their data. At Honeycomb, I design tools for software operations teams to diagnose their complex systems. These books each gave me an “ah-hah” moment that made me think differently about the craft of creating visualization. They now sit on my shelf in easy reach – I hope you find them fascinating too.

A noted quantitative hedge fund manager and quant finance author, Ernie is the founder of QTS Capital Management and Predictnow.ai. Previously he has applied his expertise in machine learning at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center’s Human Language Technologies group, at Morgan Stanley’s Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence Group, and at Credit Suisse’s Horizon Trading Group. Ernie was quoted by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and the CIO magazine, and interviewed on CNBC’s Closing Bell program. He is an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s Master’s in Data Science program and supervises student theses there. Ernie holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

I am a leader in analytics and AI strategy, and have a broad range of experience in aviation, energy, financial services, and the public sector.  I have worked with several major organizations to help them establish a leadership position in data science and to unlock real business value using advanced analytics. 

As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking. 

Throughout my academic career, my chief scholarly interest has been to assess public policy using coherent theory and rigorous empirical method. The economics of crime and justice offers a powerful framework for achieving these ends.

I am the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. I started out as a macroeconomist but, early on, discovered stats and stocks—which have long been fertile fields for data torturing and data mining. My book, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics is a compilation of a variety of dubious and misleading statistical practices. More recently, I have written several books on AI, which has a long history of overpromising and underdelivering because it is essentially data mining on steroids. No matter how loudly statisticians shout correlation is not causation, some will not hear.