Statistics is the activity of inferring results about a population given a sample. Historically, statistics books assume an underlying distribution to the data (typically, the normal distribution) and derive results under that assumption. Unfortunately, in real life, one cannot normally be sure of the underlying distribution. For that reason, this book presents a distribution-independent approach to statistics based on a simple computational counting idea called resampling. This book explains the basic concepts of resampling, then system atically presents the standard statistical measures...

Computational analysis of natural science experiments often confronts noisy data due to natural variability in environment or measurement. Drawing conclusions in the face of such noise entails a statistical analysis. Parametric statistical methods assume that the data is a sample from a population that can be characterized by a specific distribution (e.g., a normal distribution). When the assumption is true, parametric approaches can lead to high confidence predictions. However, in many cases particular distribution assumptions do not hold. In that case, assuming a distribution may yield...