Lothar Sachs

This standard work on statistical methods in life sciences and medicine provides easily understandable, illustrative, and practical guidance to students, lecturers and practitioners alike, covering all necessary methods for targeted and careful data collection, analysis, and evaluation. In addition to offering advice and recommendations on study planning and analysis, numerous examples, cross-references, further references and a detailed index provide a comprehensive approach to statistics. The consistent use of the freely available programming language R further facilitates the entry for curious users and practitioners. The book serves as a learning, reference, and application tool for individuals with varying levels of expertise and diverse interests, catering to anyone interested in the analysis of correctly acquired data – especially biologists, medical professionals, engineers and other natural scientists – both in academia and in practice. This book is a translation of the original German edition ‘Angewandte Statistik’ by Jürgen Hedderich and Lothar Sachs, 17th edition, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision by Jürgen Hedderich was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.

This outline of statistics as an aid in decision making will introduce a reader with limited mathematical background to the most important modern statistical methods. This is a revised and enlarged version, with major extensions and additions, of my "Angewandte Statistik" (5th ed.), which has proved useful for research workers and for consulting statisticians. Applied statistics is at the same time a collection of applicable statistical methods and the application of these methods to measured and/or counted observations. Abstract mathematical concepts and derivations are avoided. Special emphasis is placed on the basic principles of statistical formulation, and on the explanation of the conditions under which a certain formula or a certain test is valid. Preference is given to consideration of the analysis of small sized samples and of distribution-free methods. As a text and reference this book is written for non-mathematicians, in particular for technicians, engineers, executives, students, physicians as well as researchers in other disciplines. It gives any mathematician interested in the practical uses of statistics a general account of the subject. Practical application is the main theme; thus an essential part of the book consists in the 440 fully worked-out numerical examples, some of which are very simple; the 57 exercises with solutions; a number of different compu­ tational aids; and an extensive bibliography and a very detailed index. In particular, a collection of 232 mathematical and mathematical-statistical tables serves to enable and to simplify the computations.

Für die Planung, Durchführung und Auswertung wissenschaftlicher Studien bietet die siebte, überarbeitete Auflage mit zahlreichen Übersichten überzeugende Arbeitshilfen, die auch die üblichen Software-Pakete in wesentlichen Details ergänzen. Das Buch wendet sich an alle Anwender von statistischen Verfahren in der Praxis.

Bei der Realisierung von Projekten und spater dann bei der Ana- lyse der Daten wird uns nicht selten bewuBt, daB wir manches hat- ten besser durchdenken und sorgfaltiger planen mussen. Eine knappe Zusammenfassung wichtiger Planungsstufen sowie weiterer Gesichtspunkte, auch die Auswertung betreffend, erganzt das in den "Statistischen Methoden", knapp "M" genannt, realisierte Konzept. Auch hier wird der Leser sogenannte "intermediate stati- stical methods" antreffen, die in den einfiihrenden Lehrbuchem kaum und in den weiterfiihrenden fiir den Praktiker zu knapp dar- gestellt werden, z. B. der paarweise Vergleich von Mittelwerten an- hand neuerer Methoden (Teil III) mit den zugehOrigen Signifikanz- schranken (Anhang). Die hier vorgestellten Methoden sind wie die 12 Methoden aus M von mittlerem Schwierigkeitsgrad. Nur in we- nigen Fallen liegen sie bereits in den bekannten Programmpaketen (z. B. BMDP, P-STAT, SAS, SPSS) vor. Wiederholungen sind beabsichtigt. Widerspriiche waren nicht ganzlich zu vermeiden. Sie sind vielleicht typisch (a) fur konkurrie- rende Ziele und (b) fur eine rasch wachsende Wissenschaft, die zu- gleich auch wissenschaftliche Methodik ist mit dem Anspruch, nach Moglichkeit Praktiker und Theoretiker nicht zu sehr zu ent- tauschen. Wahrend aus der Praxis stammende Beispiele sicher besser moti- vieren, sind einfache Rechenbeispiele instruktiver, zumal sie ohne Kommentar verstanden und, abgesehen von den Tabellen des An- hangs, praktisch ohne Hilfsmittel nachvollzogen werden konnen.

Readers of my books, students and scientists, often ask for spe­ cial references not commonly found in introductory or interme­ diate books on statistics. From the titles and contents of 1449 key papers and books which are listed and numbered in Sec­ tion 5, I have selected keywords and subject headings and ar­ ranged them alphabetically together with the numbers of perti­ nent references in Section 3. Number 1153, for instance, denotes my book" Applied Statis­ tics". It contains a bibliographical section on pages 568 to 641. Supplementary material is displayed in this small bibliographi­ cal guide. It also complements well-known textbooks of Box, Hunter and Hunter (No.121), Dixon and Massey (No.286), Snedecor and Cochran (No. 1238), and many recent competitors. Since the methodology of statistics is expanding rapidly, many methods are not considered at all or only introduced in the basic textbooks of statistics. There is a need for intermediate statistical methods concerned with increasingly complicated ap­ plications of statistics to actual research situations. Here the specification of terms helps to find some sources. Since the ref­ erences vary considerably in length and content, the number of culled or extracted terms per referenced page varies even more, as does also their degree of specialization; however in most cases an intermediate statistical level is maintained.