Summary |
Chapter I should help the student to revise what he has learned in the Statistics chapters of Mathematics for Actuarial Students by extending to grouped data the technique he has already used for finding means, standard deviations and similar measures of location and dispersion. Chapter II deals with the two standard frequency distributions of most importance to actuaries, but the Poisson distribution has been excluded both in the interests of brevity and because it proves rather a ‘blind alley’ in the present state of our knowledge. At the end of Chapter III some elementary ideas of non-linear regression and spurious correlation have been introduced because of their fundamental importance, although a satisfactory treatment of these subjects in quite outside the scope of the book.
Chapter IV is probably the most important because it is not until he understands the way in which sample results can be used that a student grasps the idea of ‘statistical inference’ which underlies all modern scientific methods.
Chapter V to a large extent develops from the sampling technique described in the previous chapter.
In each of the remaining chapters standard tables have been used as examples of the methods described, and it is hoped that the student may thus be saved a good deal of reference to original papers and memoranda which he has previously been obliged to consult.
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