Matthias Schonlau

This book analyzes the costs and compensation paid for asbestos personal-injury claims and discussess such issues as the current state of asbestos litigation in the United States, the costs of compensation, the effects if litigation in the businesses, and the evolving character of litigation.

This textbook provides an accessible overview of statistical learning methods and techniques, and includes case studies using the statistical software Stata. After introductory material on statistical learning concepts and practical aspects, each further chapter is devoted to a statistical learning algorithm or a group of related techniques. In particular, the book presents logistic regression, regularized linear models such as the Lasso, nearest neighbors, the Naive Bayes classifier, classification trees, random forests, boosting, support vector machines, feature engineering, neural networks, and stacking. It also explains how to construct n-gram variables from text data. Examples, conceptual exercises and exercises using software are featured throughout, together with case studies in Stata, mostly from the social sciences; true to the book’s goal to facilitate the use of modern methods of data science in the field. Although mainly intended for upper undergraduate and graduatestudents in the social sciences, given its applied nature, the book will equally appeal to readers from other disciplines, including the health sciences, statistics, engineering and computer science.

This textbook provides an accessible overview of statistical learning methods and techniques, and includes case studies using the statistical software Stata. After introductory material on statistical learning concepts and practical aspects, each further chapter is devoted to a statistical learning algorithm or a group of related techniques. In particular, the book presents logistic regression, regularized linear models such as the Lasso, nearest neighbors, the Naive Bayes classifier, classification trees, random forests, boosting, support vector machines, feature engineering, neural networks, and stacking. It also explains how to construct n-gram variables from text data. Examples, conceptual exercises and exercises using software are featured throughout, together with case studies in Stata, mostly from the social sciences; true to the book’s goal to facilitate the use of modern methods of data science in the field. Although mainly intended for upper undergraduate and graduatestudents in the social sciences, given its applied nature, the book will equally appeal to readers from other disciplines, including the health sciences, statistics, engineering and computer science.

Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case studies, this book examines the validity of those claims. The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using e-mail and the Web to conduct research surveys, and also offer practical suggestions for designing and implementing Internet surveys most effectively.