Tutorial Session One Statistics

1. Introduction1.1. ExpectationsBefore you start reading this book, we would like to make it clear exactly what you can(and can’t) expect from it and what we do (and don’t) expect from the reader. This text isbased on 28 years of courses taught to mining engineers, geologists, hydrologists, soil scien-tists, climatologists plus the occasional geographer, pattern recognition expert, meteorologist,statistician and computer scientist. Even, on one occasion, an accountant. Over those years,we have endeavoured to pare away all extraneous mathematics and concentrate on intuitivederivations where possible. Readers interested in rigorous mathematical proofs are urged tostop here and turn to the more theoretically based books (cf. Reference Texts in Bibliogra-phy). This book is not intended to turn out fully ‡edged geostatisticians. It is intended forpeople with problems to be solved which can be assisted by a geostatistical approach.To read this book and bene…t from it you need to be fairly comfortable with basic algebra.That is, with the notion of using symbols as shorthand for longer statements. We have workedhard to bring you a consistent notation throughout the book. Where notation is out of ourcontrol, we explain carefully what each symbol stands for and try not to use that symbol foranything else. This is not always possible. For example, Student (William Gosset) developedhis distribution for the mean of a set of samples and called it the t distribution. ...