Introduction

Statistics is fundamentally concerned with the understanding of structures in data. One of the effects of the information-technology era has been to make it much easier to collect extensive datasets with minimal human intervention. Fortunately the same technological advances allow the users of statistics access to much more powerful ‘calculators’ to manipulate and display data. This book is about the modern developments in applied statistics which have been made possible by the widespread availability of workstations with high-resolution graphics and computational power equal to a mainframe of a few years ago. Workstations need software, and the S system developed at what was then AT&T’s Bell Laboratories (and now at Lucent Technologies) provides a very flexible and powerful environment in which to implement new statistical ideas. Thus this book provides both an introduction to the use of S and a course in modern statistical methods.