Customer Reviews

Computational Statistics Handbook with MATLAB, Second Edition (Chapman & Hall/CRC Computer Science & Data Analysis)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There were a lot of negative comments for this book on Amazon so I sort of held off the purchase of this book. However, last week I ordered the book and quickly realised it is very useful. The book may lack detailed theory but excellent references are scattered throughout if you really want to follow it up. And the book is easy reading and well written with most statistical concepts defined before they are used.

The focus of this book primarily is to explain how to work on statistics using Matlab and it provides a taste of various areas with adequate explanations and code to get started. One advantage of this book is they do not define their own notation but use the notation which is currently in vogue in academia.

If you are starting out in Matlab, are not a statistician and do not have previous experience with other packages (like Splus or R) you should definetly think about getting a copy. If you are a Stats Guru you can just read the toolbox documentation. However note that these authors provide their additional stats toolbox FREE (which is also well written) on the website which contains most of Matlab statistical functions so you could save yourself some money on the Stats toolbox.

As an independent student of probability and statistics this was a great find. You get a great overview of the useful algorithms of computational statistics. The chapter on Exploratory Data Analysis with its use of multidimensional graphing was very enlightening. It's wonderful that each topic is accompanied by source code (free on-line) that lets you see exactly how it's done. It's easy to tweak the code and explore your own data as you go along. You get just enough theory to understand the algorithm and lots of good common sense and rules-of-thumb on how to best apply it. Finally, the extensive bibliography and chapter-by-chapter annotations will point you straight to the best source for more in-depth study.

This book is amazing. It covers so many important computations using Matlab, including probability density estimation, supervised learning, parametric/non-parametric models as well as Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.
The negative reviews are from people who were looking for something else in this book. As it stands this is one outstanding book and one of the few books I keep permanently on my desk (I own over 200 books). Credit to the writers for the amount of detail especially in the code (no mistakes found yet).

Up to the point - great to have on the shelf for quick consultations. It makes a great textbook to be complemented with specialized papers on the different topics. A must have for anyone doing computational Statistics in Matlab. "Exploratory Data Analysis with MATLAB" by Wendy L. Martinez, Angel R. Martinez is a great follow up volume to this book.

I was initially excited about this title. It seemed like an opportunity to develop some advanced techniques and learn them interactively with Matlab. Unfortuantely, I was disappointed upon reading the book. The topics themselves are not developed well by the authors and the Matlab examples are way too simple for them to be of any use or for the reader to gain insight. The material itself is somewhat eclectic, but for the price/value I just can't see it. A determinted researcher could find the same thing for free on the internet.

Great buy..neatly Represented. Will always Recommend.
For anybody who really want to use Matlab in Practice. I find this book great.

I ordered this book assuming to get something useful, but i got the impression while reading the book that it is like a collection of notes from other books, wrapped with some matlab code. More worrying to me was that the mathematics makes a sloppy impression. For me that means I cannot grab the book to lookup something and use the code without having to be concerned on the validity. The bottomline being I will not use it for applications and the book is a waste of money.