Design and analysis of experiments for statistical selection, screening and multiple comparisons

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Book Reviews

cedures with higher power were not provided, and multiple comparisons of binomial or multinomial distributions were not considered.

Robert E. Bechhofer, Thomas J. Santner, David M. Goldsman (1995): Design and Analysis of Experiments for Statistical Selection, Screening and Multiple Comparisons. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., ISBN 0-471-57427-9, £ 45.00, pp. 325

This volume contains classical methods as well as procedures which were developed only recently. Therefore, it will be valuable for practitioners as well as for statisticians who are interested in the development of the theory.

Many studies or experiments are performed to f'md out the 'best' population, e.g., the most effective drug or the variety of grain with the largest yield etc. Then in most cases the appropriate statistical instrument will be a statistical selection procedure, not a test. The pioneering papers in the field of selection were written by Bechhofer, Gupta and others 40 years ago. However, because most publications in that field were not written with the experimenter in mind, until now statistical methods for ranking and selection and their philosophy remained unknown to many practitioners. This book is aimed to bridge this gap. Consequently, proofs, theorems and complicated formulas were completely omitted, and many examples and figures were used for explanations and interpretations. A lot of tables support the use of the methods described, and FORTRAN programs were also provided. The book requires some knowledge in elementary statistics and, for several methods, in classical experimental design. Scientific workers in engineering, pharmaceutical research, biology, agriculture, horticulture, psychology, marketing, advertising and other fields will benefit from this well organized volume. The authors restricted themselves to problems with means of normal populations, with success probabilities of binomial distributions, and with multinomial distributions. Nonparametric methods are not described. The book mainly deals with selection methods with the indifference-zone approach (~60%), among them a lot of sequential procedures. The word 'screening' in the title and elsewhere refers to subset selection. The few multiple comparison methods are restricted to simultaneous confidence intervals with normal distributions. Stepwise pro-

Manfred Horn Jena, Germany

N.L. Johnson, S. Kotz & N. Balakrishnan (1995): Continuous Univariate Distributions. Vol. 2, 2nd Edition. John Wiley, New York, ISBN: £ 70.00, pp xix + 719 Like the first volume on continous distributions, volume 2 of this classic has been fully revised, updated and enlarged. Contents: 22

Extreme Value Distributions

23

Logistic Distribution

24

Laplace (Double Exponential) Distributions

25

Beta Distributions

26

Uniform (Rectangular) Distributions

27

F-Distributions

28

t-Distributions

29

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Noncentral F-Distribution

31

Noncentral t-Distribution

32

Distributions of Correlation Coefficients

33

Lifetime Distributions and Miscellanous Orderings

The chapter on extreme value distributions, originally contained in volume 1, is now included in volume 2. The treatment of quadratic forms has been postponed to the volume on continuous multivariate distributions that is to appear later. More emphasis is on applications in various fields of science, business and technology. Almost every chapter presents an outline on the genesis of the distribution under study, and adds historical re-