Books in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics Textbooks series

Core Statistics is a compact starter course on the fundamentals of inference for parametric statistical models, including both theory and practical numerical computation. It delivers the theory and tools that a beginning graduate student, or any quantitative scientist, needs to make informed use of powerful statistical methods.

This account of the new and exciting area of noise sensitivity of Boolean functions - in particular applied to critical percolation - is designed for graduate students and researchers in probability theory, discrete mathematics, and theoretical computer science. It assumes a basic background in probability theory and integration theory. Each chapter ends with exercises.

This textbook offers a compact introduction to Malliavin calculus. It covers recent applications, and includes a self-contained presentation of preliminary material on Brownian motion and stochastic calculus. Accessible to non-experts, graduate students and researchers can use this book to master the core techniques necessary for further study.

Communication networks underpin our modern world, and provide fascinating and challenging examples of large-scale stochastic systems. Randomness arises in communication systems at many levels: for example, the initiation and termination times of calls in a telephone network, or the statistical structure of the arrival streams of packets at routers in the Internet. How can routing, flow control and connection acceptance algorithms be designed to work well in uncertain and random environments? This compact introduction illustrates how stochastic models can be used to shed light on important issues in the design and control of communication networks. It will appeal to readers with a mathematical background wishing to understand this important area of application, and to those with an engineering background who want to grasp the underlying mathematical theory. Each chapter ends with exercises and suggestions for further reading.

Filtering and smoothing methods are used to produce an accurate estimate of the state of a time-varying system based on multiple observational inputs (data). Interest in these methods has exploded in recent years, with numerous applications emerging in fields such as navigation, aerospace engineering, telecommunications and medicine. This compact, informal introduction for graduate students and advanced undergraduates presents the current state-of-the-art filtering and smoothing methods in a unified Bayesian framework. Readers learn what non-linear Kalman filters and particle filters are, how they are related, and their relative advantages and disadvantages. They also discover how state-of-the-art Bayesian parameter estimation methods can be combined with state-of-the-art filtering and smoothing algorithms. The book's practical and algorithmic approach assumes only modest mathematical prerequisites. Examples include Matlab computations, and the numerous end-of-chapter exercises include computational assignments. Matlab code is available for download at www.cambridge.org/sarkka, promoting hands-on work with the methods.

This book presents for the first time to a graduate-level readership recent groundbreaking developments in probability and combinatorics related to the longest increasing subsequence problem. Its detailed, playful presentation provides a motivating entry to elegant mathematical ideas that are of interest to every mathematician and to many computer scientists, physicists and statisticians.

This self-contained introduction to the Poisson process covers basic theory and certain advanced topics in the setting of a general abstract measure space. The text includes applications and numerous exercises, and is ideal for graduate courses or self-study by mathematicians, physicists, and engineers.

This intuitive hands-on text introduces stochastic differential equations (SDEs) as motivated by applications in target tracking and medical technology, and covers their use in methodologies such as filtering, parameter estimation, and machine learning. Examples include applications of SDEs arising in physics and electrical engineering.

This textbook offers a compact introduction to Malliavin calculus. It covers recent applications, and includes a self-contained presentation of preliminary material on Brownian motion and stochastic calculus. Accessible to non-experts, graduate students and researchers can use this book to master the core techniques necessary for further study.

This book explains the fundamental ideas of Bayesian analysis, with a focus on computational methods such as MCMC and available software such as R/R-INLA, OpenBUGS, JAGS, Stan, and BayesX. It is suitable as a textbook for a first graduate-level course and as a user's guide for researchers and graduate students from beyond statistics.

This readable, digestible introduction to exponential families of distributions covers the essential theory and demonstrates its use in applications. Containing a vast set of examples and numerous exercises, it is written for graduate students and researchers with a background in basic statistical inference.

This introduction to some of the principal models in the theory of disordered systems leads the reader through the basics, to the very edge of contemporary research, with the minimum of technical fuss. Topics covered include random walk, percolation, self-avoiding walk, interacting particle systems, uniform spanning tree, random graphs, as well as the Ising, Potts, and random-cluster models for ferromagnetism, and the Lorentz model for motion in a random medium. Schramm-Lowner evolutions (SLE) arise in various contexts. The choice of topics is strongly motivated by modern applications and focuses on areas that merit further research. Special features include a simple account of Smirnov's proof of Cardy's formula for critical percolation, and a fairly full account of the theory of influence and sharp-thresholds. Accessible to a wide audience of mathematicians and physicists, this book can be used as a graduate course text. Each chapter ends with a range of exercises.