» Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences

Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Well...
Comment: You can tell he isn't an English major. The material is fine. A decent reference book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Well...
Comment: You can tell he isn't an English major. The material is fine. A decent reference book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: It has its ups and downs
Comment: As far as a book that gears you to applying statistics to the lab it does the job adequately. As far as explaining the theory of probability and statistics in a coherent way it leaves much to be desired. If I were a lab instructor I would probably use the book "Introduction to Probability and Statistics" by Milton and Arnold and just lecture on propagation of errors and the likewise.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An obscure error in a good book
Comment: Bevington's book "Data Reduction and Error Analysis" is an old war-horse that is now in its third edition, and looks a good intermediate-level, practical reference to have on the shelf. I bought my copy only recently to follow up a reference, so am less familiar with it than I'd like to be before writing a review.

Unfortunately, following that reference led me to equation 4.22, which is wrong. When forming a weighted average of variances, one needs to square the weights in the numerator and square the sum of weights in the denominator. The equation as given has the first power of the weights and of the sum, just as found in the weighted mean. As I sort the matter out myself (with help from a friendly statistician) and look around at other treatments, this appears to be a common mistake, but mistake it is.

Otherwise, it seems a good book clearly written.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: All new but just as good
Comment: This book seems to have been completely rewritten by the new author, only keeping the outline of the original, and it's for the better. The writing is as careful as the original, and as economical, so you have to master the early chapters or the rest is hopeless, as things start off slowly but quickly become difficult. It begins by considering the error in a single measurement, and proceeds to estimating errors derived from curve fitting. A few nuclear decay experiments provide examples throughout, and the author insists on calculating many quantities manually, even though in practice it would never be done that way. Some background topics like matrix algebra appear in the appendix too.

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