This book is a broad-based introduction to an increasingly important topic. The overview is easy because each chapter is structured uniformly: theory, methods, realization alternatives, methodical and practical advantages and disadvantages, and examples from industrial technology and medicine as well as research and development practice.

Sampling, wavelets, and tomography are three active areas of contemporary mathematics sharing common roots that lie at the heart of harmonic and Fourier analysis. The advent of new techniques in mathematical analysis has strengthened their interdependence and led to some new and interesting results in the field.

Following the classical sampling theory, the survey statistician selects samples of people, businesses or others, in order to obtain the desired information. Drawing the samples is usually done by randomly selecting from a list representing the target population. In practice, this list is often not available. At best, the statistician only has access to a different list, indirectly related to the targeted population.

This monograph is the first book-length exposition of ranked set sampling. But, the subject matter is by no means new. The original notion of ranked set sampling, though not the technical term, was proposed by McIntyre in 1952. It was buried in the literature for quite a while. Its value was only re-discovered in recent years because of its cost-effective nature. Now, ranked set sampling has attracted practical interest in application areas such as agriculture, forestry, ecological and environmental science, and medical studies etc .. The theoretical foundations of the method has also been developed considerably, particularly during the last 15 years or so. A systematic exposition of the subject becomes necessary. This book covers every development of RSS since the birth of the original idea. Statistical inferences based on RSS are investigated from the originally intended estimation of a population mean to many more complicated pro­ cedures such as the inferences on smooth-function-of-means, quantiles and density functions, the distribution-free tests and regression analyses. Various variants of the original RSS scheme are explored, including RSS with imper­ fect judgment ranking or ranking by concomitant variables, adaptive RSS, multi-layer RSS and a variety of unbalanced RSS with certain optimalities.

This collection of papers originates from a meeting are in current use on board UK research vessels. organized in May 1988 at the Geological Society, Marine geological exploration requires information under three further headings: (i) the "shape" of the London, under the auspices of its Marine Studies Group. The meeting was concerned with reviewing sea floor, (ii) the nature of the rocks and sediments the present state-of-the-art of marine geological and which lie at its surface, and (iii) the nature of deeper geophysical sampling and surveying techniques.

Quasi–Monte Carlo methods have become an increasingly popular alternative to Monte Carlo methods over the last two decades. Their successful implementation on practical problems, especially in finance, has motivated the development of several new research areas within this field to which practitioners and researchers from various disciplines currently contribute.

This book is a multi-purpose document. It can be used as a text by teachers, as a reference manual by researchers, and as a practical guide by statisticians. It covers 1165 references from different research journals through almost 1900 citations across 1194 pages, a large number of complete proofs of theorems, important results such as corollaries, and 324 unsolved exercises from several research papers. It includes 159 solved, data-based, real life numerical examples in disciplines such as Agriculture, Demography, Social Science, Applied Economics, Engineering, Medicine, and Survey Sampling.

This research monograph deals with fast stochastic simulation based on im­ portance sampling (IS) principles and some of its applications. It is in large part devoted to an adaptive form of IS that has proved to be effective in appli­ cations that involve the estimation of probabilities of rare events. Rare events are often encountered in scientific and engineering processes. Their charac­ terization is especially important as their occurrence can have catastrophic consequences of varying proportions. Examples range from fracture due to material fatigue in engineering structures to exceedance of dangerous levels during river water floods to false target declarations in radar systems. Fast simulation using IS is essentially a forced Monte Carlo procedure designed to hasten the occurrence of rare events. Development of this simu­ lation method of analysis of scientific phenomena is usually attributed to the mathematician von Neumann, and others. Since its inception, MC simula­ tion has found a wide range of employment, from statistical thermodynamics in disordered systems to the analysis and design of engineering structures characterized by high complexity. Indeed, whenever an engineering problem is analytically intractable (which is often the case) and a solution by nu­ merical techniques prohibitively expensive computationally, a last resort to determine the input-output characteristics of, or states within, a system is to carry out a simulation.

This book provides a clear and straightforward guide for all those seeking to conduct quantitative research in the field of education, using primary research data samples. While positioned as less powerful and somehow inferior, non-parametric tests can be very useful where the research can only be designed to accommodate data structure which is ordinal, or scale but violates a normality assumption, which is required for parametric tests. Non-parametric data are a staple of educational research, and as such, it is essential that educational researchers learn how to work with these data with confidence and rigour.