Book Description

The book is a collection of 80 short and self-contained lectures covering most of the topics that are usually taught in intermediate courses in probability theory and mathematical statistics. There are hundreds of examples, solved exercises and detailed derivations of important results. The step-by-step approach makes the book easy to understand and ideal for self-study. One of the main aims of the book is to be a time saver: it contains several results and proofs, especially on probability distributions, that are hard to find in standard references and are scattered here and there in more specialistic books. The topics covered by the book are as follows. PART 1 - MATHEMATICAL TOOLS: set theory, permutations, combinations, partitions, sequences and limits, review of differentiation and integration rules, the Gamma and Beta functions. PART 2 - FUNDAMENTALS OF PROBABILITY: events, probability, independence, conditional probability, Bayes' rule, random variables and random vectors, expected value, variance, covariance, correlation, covariance matrix, conditional distributions and conditional expectation, independent variables, indicator functions. PART 3 - ADDITIONAL TOPICS IN PROBABILITY THEORY: probabilistic inequalities, construction of probability distributions, transformations of probability distributions, moments and cross-moments, moment generating functions, characteristic functions. PART 4 - PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS: Bernoulli, binomial, Poisson, uniform, exponential, normal, Chi-square, Gamma, Student's t, F, multinomial, multivariate normal, multivariate Student's t, Wishart. PART 5 - MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE NORMAL DISTRIBUTION: linear combinations, quadratic forms, partitions. PART 6 - ASYMPTOTIC THEORY: sequences of random vectors and random variables, pointwise convergence, almost sure convergence, convergence in probability, mean-square convergence, convergence in distribution, relations between modes of convergence, Laws of Large Numbers, Central Limit Theorems, Continuous Mapping Theorem, Slutsky's Theorem. PART 7 - FUNDAMENTALS OF STATISTICS: statistical inference, point estimation, set estimation, hypothesis testing, statistical inferences about the mean, statistical inferences about the variance.