Customer Reviews

Plane Answers to Complex Questions: The Theory of Linear Models

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This is a pretty good textbook for the linear model. If you have backgrounds in experimental design and matrix theory. Then this book will help you a lot. Some people may recommend the Searle's linear model. But Searle's book may be too focus on the theories therefore not too many applications.
If you are looking for a book for your linear model class. You might choose this one. Since it will help for your first step on the Linear model.

This book is very suitable for graduate students wishing to learn some linear algebra. It covers a lot of more recent topics such as mixed models.

While Dr. Christensen's writing is very clear, a lot more examples and/or exercises would definitely help to illustrate his points. For example, in section 2.4 he claims that "it's immaterial to use MSE or MLE [as] they will lead to identical confidence intervals and tests for sigma^2". This can be easily made as an exercise in chapter 3, where he discusses hypothesis testing. At least so that the students can see his point well. Moreover, I would appreciate it if he put like 5 or 6 exercises that make the students integrate every aspect they learned so far (like section 4.3 exercises). Practically, everything past chapter 9 is theoretical. I would appreciate it if he puts examples and/or exercises.

I believe that the BLUP of section 12.2 should be put right after section 6.3. Current placement on chapter 12 makes it a bit disruptive to read.

In addition, I think he should put more exercises in appendix A and B since they give the required linear algebra background for students, especially appendix B about Kronecker product and Tensor. I think he also needs to mention about [A (x) B]' = [A' (x) B'] in section B.5 since it's needed in chapter 7. While I understand that those appendices are background materials, I would think that more examples would also help, instead of just list of theorems.

Other than that, it's a pretty solid book.

The book has rave reviews from other professors. Here in lies the problem. From a students perspective the book is very confusing and hard to follow. All the examples in the first part of the book (they are scarce) are based off of one system listed in the first chapter. The questions for review sometimes have nothing to do with the chapter they are located and may require definitions presented in other chapters or other books. Notations are sometimes tricky and often not defined clearly (sometimes tucked away in a paragraph in appendices and not referenced by the index). The overall method of the book is somewhat clear, but needs a few more revisions until I would recommend this book to anyone.