Sunday, March 18, 2012

How to Lie With Statistics by Darren Huff


From its title, one would probably guess that the book is about how statistics can be misleading. Indeed, the book discusses the various forms of bias that we may see in statistics, including sampling bias (unrepresentative population), data-collection bias, misleading representations/uses of data, etc. It uses real-life examples to show how data can be distorted with various techniques.

The things discussed in the book are all quite straightforward. In fact, I have learnt all of them in my data management class already. Nevertheless, I liked the succinctness and clearness of the book as well as the humourous illustrations used to demonstrate the concepts. In short, How to lie with statistics is a stress-less and light read that may teach you some important and useful things.