This book is about turning data into knowledge. Data is cheap (at least relatively); knowledge is harder to come by. I will present three related pieces: Probability is the study of random events. Most people have an intuitive understanding of degrees of probability, which is why you can use words like "probably" and "unlikely" without special training, but we will talk about how to make quantitative claims about those degrees.
Statistics is the discipline of using data samples to support claims about populations. Most statistical analysis is based on probability, which is why these pieces are usually presented together. Computation is a tool that is well-suited to quantitative analysis, and computers are commonly used to process statistics. Also, computational experiments are useful for exploring concepts in probability and statistics.
