Customer Reviews

Logistic Regression: A Self-Learning Text

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When Kleinbaum entitles his book "a self-learning text", this is TRUE ! I'm sure anyone can learn logistic regression with this book. It is cristal-clear, very progressive, with real-data examples... If the best teachers are those who make you feel you're intelligent, certainly the author must be a good teacher... because his book is ! I do recommend it warmly to anyone who has to teach (like me) or learn logistic regression.

I'm a physician learning about clinical research/biostatistics etc. I found that this book was extremely helpful in guiding me through basic rules, steps and theories on how to build a logistic regression model. The examples where straight forward, even for a person without a strong math background. However, I can also see that this would not be enough for a person set out to be a biostatistician, as this book would seem rather elementary. If you are a person with a so-so background in math and statistics, and are interested in learning to adequately perform statistical analyses with logistic regression, this is the book for you.

This book has a specific goal. It's aim is to give a basic competence in the use of logistic regression, related techniques, and the software that deal with them. This, it does very well. By intent, it leaves many other needs unmet.

The format is 13 chapters, possibly representing the 13 or 14 weeks in a typical school term. Each chapter has a specific statement of teaching goals at the front, a summary outline of the course to date in the back, and a few pages of questions or exercises with answers. There appear to be sample data sets available, formatted for popular stats packages, but I did not figure out how they are made available. Within the main text of each chapter, every page reads like a blackboard lecture: equations on the left and narration on the right. The presentation uses a minimum of math, just a little algebra and exponentials in a few specific forms.

For the aspiring tool-user, this book may be worth a semester's tuition. I can fault it only for an annoying habit of writing out in words equations that appear on the same page ("e raised to the power of the sum of products ... ").

This book is NOT meant for people truly interested in the theory or practice of the exact computations. For example, its use of probability scarely mentions joint or conditional distributions. As a result, some of its formulas (e.g. p.48) come across as rote memorization, instead of natural expressions of the laws of probability. Lacking joint probability, the covariance matrix can not have meaning. It is just something produced, somehow, by an oracular computer program.

The repeated phrase, "according to statisticians ..." makes it very clear that statisticians are a breed distinct from intended audience. What they do is quite alien, but somehow, sometimes leaves the student with formulas to grind through.

Before you buy this book, be very clear about what you expect from it. Beginning students may get a lot from it. Readers already familiar with probability and some stats are likely to be disappointed.

A great book makes all the difference and that's exactly what this book did for my studies and research. It provides easy to follow descriptions of the scientific concepts with interpretation using real data and stata/sas output. I've enrolled in courses for advanced logistic, GLM, and correlated data, that require other books and research monographs, but found this one, that I used for my first logistic regression the course, the most useful for those courses as well. Another hidden gem is the appendices that provide code for SAS, Stata, and SPSS--I use stata and sas. The authors survival analysis is also one of the few books I have purchased during my graduate studies.

It is a long wordy introduction to logistic regression. The good point about this book is that it has a lot of exercises (most of them simiple) that strength your understanding. It also has answers. However, the material can be condensed into 1/4 of its 700 pages easily. Other books like Agresti's books on categorical analysis are far more condensed and more difficult to digest. I think this is a good book for beginners to learn logistic regression or regression in general.

This book contains a detailed text along with a "presentation" next to the text, much like a Powerpoint presentation, which allows you to skim the material efficiently. I highly recommend this book for logistic modeling classes.

I didn't read the whole book yet, but I found the 2 chapters of GEE are really helpful. I actually read couple papers before, it is hard to understand. This book is written well, everything is so clearly illustrated. I also briefly looked through other chapters of the book. It is a great book for who is studying logistic regression by himself or people like me who looking for specific reference for some topic.

Simply the best logistic regression book I've seen. Concepts clearly and succinctly explained and illustrated.
A must-have for all biostatisticians.

The textbook "Logistic Regression" is an excellent textbook of this statistical method because it is complete and relatively easy. This method will never be really easy but the Authors present the logistic regression in an comprehensible way introducing progressively new terms. The provide many simple clinical examples.

Kleinbaum has done it again. His books are so informative and easy to understand. It is worth the money.