Applied Statistical Decision Theory

In the field of statistical decision theory, Raiffa and Schlaifer have sought to develop new analytic techniques by which the modern theory of utility and subjective probability can actually be applied to the economic analysis of typical sampling problems. —From the foreword to their classic work Applied Statistical Decision Theory . First published in the 1960s through Harvard University and MIT Press, the book is now offered in a new paperback edition from Wiley Booknews Addressed to those who are interested in using statistics as a tool in practical problems of decision making under conditions of uncertainty and who also have the necessary training in mathematics and statistics to employ these analytical techniques. The underlying principle of the material outlined in the book is the Bayesian approach which provides a formal mechanism for taking account of preferences and weights rather than leaving it up to the decision maker's intuition. Topics covered include sufficient statistics and noninformative stopping, conjugate prior distributions, additive utility and opportunity loss, linear terminal analysis, selection of processes, problems in which the act and state spaces coincide, multivariate normalized density functions, Bernoulli process, Poisson process, independent normal process, and normal regression process. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)