Large Sample Theory

This book offers a comprehensive guide to large sample techniques in statistics. More importantly, it focuses on thinking skills rather than just what formulae to use; it provides motivations, and intuition, rather than detailed proofs; it begins with very simple techniques, and connects theory and applications in entertaining ways.

This graduate-level textbook is primarily aimed at graduate students of statistics, mathematics, science, and engineering who have had an undergraduate course in statistics, an upper division course in analysis, and some acquaintance with measure theoretic probability. It provides a rigorous presentation of the core of mathematical statistics.

This book is an encyclopedic treatment of classic as well as contemporary large sample theory, dealing with both statistical problems and probabilistic issues and tools. It is written in an extremely lucid style, with an emphasis on the conceptual discussion of the importance of a problem and the impact and relevance of the theorems. The book has 34 chapters over a wide range of topics, nearly 600 exercises for practice and instruction, and another 300 worked out examples. It also includes a large compendium of 300 useful inequalities on probability, linear algebra, and analysis that are collected together from numerous sources, as an invaluable reference for researchers in statistics, probability, and mathematics.

This text is for a one semester graduate course in statistical theory and covers minimal and complete sufficient statistics, maximum likelihood estimators, method of moments, bias and mean square error, uniform minimum variance estimators and the Cramer-Rao lower bound, an introduction to large sample theory, likelihood ratio tests and uniformly most powerful tests and the Neyman Pearson Lemma. A major goal of this text is to make these topics much more accessible to students by using the theory of exponential families.