The text teaches that a distribution is useless without understanding its : mean (central tendency), variance/spread, skewness (asymmetry), and kurtosis. For a dam designer, knowing the mean river flow is useless; knowing the variance and the upper tail of the flow distribution is matters of life and death.
Using hypothesis testing (Type I error – false violation; Type II error – undetected violation) and control charts. The engineer can set sampling frequencies and alert limits to balance the risk of falsely alarming the public against the risk of allowing unsafe water. Volume 1 covers Bayesian updating – how to combine prior knowledge (e.g., the filter is new) with incoming data to refine the estimated contaminant distribution. The text teaches that a distribution is useless
The subtitle’s “Emphasis on Applications” is what differentiates this book from a generic statistics textbook. Every chapter includes solved examples drawn directly from civil and environmental publications. The engineer can set sampling frequencies and alert