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by mitchelldeacon9 3543 days ago
Hello, I studied economics and statistics in college and grad school, and worked as a teaching assistant for undergraduate statistics courses. Here is a short, annotated bibliography of my favorite statistics books.

1. Ayres, Ian (2007) Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart

[Good introductory summary of the main concepts in statistics with many real-world examples]

2. Bernstein, Peter (1996) Against the Gods: Remarkable Story of Risk

[Intellectual history of statistics, accessible to beginning students.]

3. Healey, Joseph (2005) Statistics: A Tool for Social Research, 7E

[This is the text book that was used in the undergraduate statistics courses while I was working as a teaching assistant at UC Santa Cruz.]

4. Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow

[Kahneman combines cognitive psychology with statistical concepts; highly recommended]

5. Silver, Nate (2012) Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, but Some Don't

[Silver's book offers an excellent summary of major concepts in statistics and how they are applied to real-world problems]

6. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2005) Fooled by Randomness, 2E

_________ (2010) Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2E

[Important critique of statistics and how it is mis-used and mis-applied, particularly in econometrics]

Hope this helps. Shoot me an email if you have any questions. Good luck. mitchelldeacon9@gmail.com

1 comments

These books are more for casual reading, except for Book 3. If I may, do you have more recommendations similar to Book 3? In addition to my personal interest, my read of the OP request was he looking for more technical details. For myself, what books are good for a second or third course in stats? I have a finance background, so I'm familiar with the intro stuff in Book 3.

As a recommendation to the OP, "Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran is amazing.

The only advanced textbook on statistics that I would recommend is: Kennedy, Peter (2008) Guide to Econometrics, 6E