Sture Holm - Understanding Statistics

STURE HOLM

UNDERSTANDING STATISTICS

Understanding Statistics
1 st edition
2016 Sture Holm & bookboon.com
ISBN 978-87-403-1407-6
Peer reviewed by Professor emeritus Elisabeth Svensson, rebro university

CONTENTS

About the author 6
1 Lots of figures with quality and without 8
2 More or less probable 11
3 Dependence and independence 16
4 My first confidence interval 24
5 Location and dispersion in theory and practice 31
6 A useful root 41
7 Completely normal and almost normal 47
8 Within the error margin 57
9 Pure juridical matters 63
10 Some old classics 70
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sture Holm, born in 1936, is a retired professor of biostatistics at Gteborg University. After starting his academic career with a Masters degree in Electrical engineering and working with construction of radar systems in the industry for some years, he went back to the university for further study of mathematical statistics. From the beginning the interest was directed towards random processes, but soon it shifted over to statistical inference both theoretically and in application.

He has always had a broad interest within the field. Among the early subfields of his may be mentioned nonparametric statistics and sequential analysis. Always there has been a broad genuine interest of all kinds of application as well as education at all levels. In the job as a senior lecturer at Chalmers Technical University he used to give a basic courses in statistics to almost 500 students per year. During those years he also wrote some Swedish textbooks. All this time, but also later, he has had an interest both to give advanced lectures to specialists and to give introductory lectures to those who did not have a mathematical background, and perhaps even hated mathematics.

Year 19791980 Sture Holm was employed at Aalborg University as professor of Mathematics, in particular mathematical statistics. It was a good opportunity at this time for two reasons. The first one was to get a better balance between education and research than in Gteborg earlier, and the other one was to be able to work in the interesting education system they had in Aalborg, with good real life projects included in the education all the time and small students groups working together under surveillance mixed freely with lectures in bigger groups when needed.

This year 1979 also appeared his mot known paper A Simple Sequentially Rejective Multiple Test Procedure (Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 6, p. 6570). It met a very big interest in different fields of application and is nowadays in the reference list of more than eleven thousands of scientific papers. It was a pioneering paper on methods to handle several statistical issues simultaneously in a common strictly logical setting. During all times very few papers within statistics has reached that number of citation.
From 1984 to 1993 Sture Holm was the professor in Statistics at the School of Economics in Gteborg which gave insight in a new type of applications. Since it was the only professorship at the department it also meant to give PhD courses in all parts of statistical inference. Bootstrap is a nice idea for statistical applications, which interested him much in those years. He gave seminars on bootstrap at several universities and made also some theoretical contributions to the field.

In 1993 there was created a new professorship in Biostatistics at the faculty of Natural sciences and mathematics at Gteborg University supported by the medical faculty. The job was placed at the Institute for mathematical sciences, which is common for Gteborg University and Chalmers Technical University. It gave a better possibility to get good coworkers and students as well better contact with many important applications, among them also medical.

One type of data appearing often in soft sciences is results of scale judgments. Holm started a development of suitable methods for analysis together with a coworker, who has later developed the methods further. Another type of work is design of experiments and analysis of variance dependence in those, starting also with a coworker, who has continued the development. He has also given courses for industry in experimental design, and there is a Swedish book by him on this subject available at bookboon.com . With a colleague he has done some works on models for metal fatigue life analysis. Application work has been done for instance also within odontology on the analysis of oral implants, analysis of weight modules in archeological gold and silver finds and numerous other types of applications.

Of recent interests on application oriented statistical methods may be mentioned development of statistically proper methods for rankings between units concerning some quality, e.g. operation results for different hospitals, and investigation of properties of methods using imputation e.g. in educational studies.

During the years Sture Holm has also had some leading academic positions. He has been the head of the Department of Mathematical sciences at Chalmers and Department of statistics at the School of economics, head of education in Engineering physics at Chalmers, chairman of the Swedish statistical association for two periods and chairman (president) of the Nordic region of Biometric society for one period.