Objective Statistics

The objective of this book is to illustrate statistical methodologies that incorporate physical and numerical experiments and that allow one to schedule and plan technological innovation, similar to any other productive activity. This methodology should be implemented through a structured procedure aimed at reducing the high rate of commercial failure characterizing actual innovation processes. In fact, it is well known that:

The statistical analysis of discrete multivariate data has received a great deal of attention in the statistics literature over the past two decades. The develop­ ment ofappropriate models is the common theme of books such as Cox (1970), Haberman (1974, 1978, 1979), Bishop et al. (1975), Gokhale and Kullback (1978), Upton (1978), Fienberg (1980), Plackett (1981), Agresti (1984), Goodman (1984), and Freeman (1987). The objective of our book differs from those listed above. Rather than concentrating on model building, our intention is to describe and assess the goodness-of-fit statistics used in the model verification part of the inference process.