Book Review:; Essential Statistics for Data Science: A Concise Crash Course

Abstract

SIAM Review, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 206-207, March 2025.
This is a bold book! Professor Zhu wants to provide the basic statistical knowledge needed by data scientists in a super-short volume. It reminds me a bit of Larry Wasserman’s All of Statistics (Springer, 2014), but is aimed at Masters students (often from fields other than statistics) or advanced undergraduates (also often from other fields). As an attendee at far too many faculty meetings, I applaud brevity and focus. As an amateur stylist, I admire strong technical writing. And as an applied statistician who has taught basic statistics to Masters and Ph.D. students from other disciplines, I appreciate the need for a book of this kind. For the right course I would happily use this book, although I would need to supplement it with other material.