This volume is a collection of papers presented at a conference held in Shoresh Holiday Resort near Jerusalem, Israel, in December 2000 organized by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport. The theme of the conference was "Foundation of Statistical Inference: Applications in the Medical and Social Sciences and in Industry and the Interface of Computer Sciences". The following is a quotation from the Program and Abstract booklet of the conference. "Over the past several decades, the field of statistics has seen tremendous growth and development in theory and methodology. At the same time, the advent of computers has facilitated the use of modern statistics in all branches of science, making statistics even more interdisciplinary than in the past; statistics, thus, has become strongly rooted in all empirical research in the medical, social, and engineering sciences. The abundance of computer programs and the variety of methods available to users brought to light the critical issues of choosing models and, given a data set, the methods most suitable for its analysis. Mathematical statisticians have devoted a great deal of effort to studying the appropriateness of models for various types of data, and defining the conditions under which a particular method work. " In 1985 an international conference with a similar title* was held in Is rael. It provided a platform for a formal debate between the two main schools of thought in Statistics, the Bayesian, and the Frequentists.

This book provides a concise introduction to exponential families. Parametric families of probability distributions and their properties are extensively studied in the literature on statistical modeling and inference. Exponential families of distributions comprise density functions of a particular form, which enables general assertions and leads to nice features. With a focus on parameter estimation and hypotheses testing, the text introduces the reader to distributional and statistical properties of multivariate and multiparameter exponential families along with a variety of detailed examples. The material is widely self-contained and written in a mathematical setting. It may serve both as a concise, mathematically rigorous course on exponential families in a systematic structure and as an introduction to Mathematical Statistics restricted to the use of exponential families.

A readable, digestible introduction to essential theory and wealth of applications, with a vast set of examples and numerous exercises.

This accessible course on a central player in modern statistical practice connects models with methodology, without need for advanced math.

A comprehensive account of the statistical theory of exponential families of stochastic processes. The book reviews the progress in the field made over the last ten years or so by the authors - two of the leading experts in the field - and several other researchers. The theory is applied to a broad spectrum of examples, covering a large number of frequently applied stochastic process models with discrete as well as continuous time. To make the reading even easier for statisticians with only a basic background in the theory of stochastic process, the first part of the book is based on classical theory of stochastic processes only, while stochastic calculus is used later. Most of the concepts and tools from stochastic calculus needed when working with inference for stochastic processes are introduced and explained without proof in an appendix. This appendix can also be used independently as an introduction to stochastic calculus for statisticians. Numerous exercises are also included.

The core of this paper is a general set of variational principles for the problems of computing marginal probabilities and modes, applicable to multivariate statistical models in the exponential family.

This book focuses on the application and development of information geometric methods in the analysis, classification and retrieval of images and signals. It provides introductory chapters to help those new to information geometry and applies the theory to several applications. This area has developed rapidly over recent years, propelled by the major theoretical developments in information geometry, efficient data and image acquisition and the desire to process and interpret large databases of digital information. The book addresses both the transfer of methodology to practitioners involved in database analysis and in its efficient computational implementation.

This extraordinary three-volume work, written in an engaging and rigorous style by a world authority in the field, provides an accessible, comprehensive introduction to the full spectrum of mathematical and statistical techniques underpinning contemporary methods in data-driven learning and inference. This first volume, Foundations, introduces core topics in inference and learning, such as matrix theory, linear algebra, random variables, convex optimization and stochastic optimization, and prepares students for studying their practical application in later volumes. A consistent structure and pedagogy is employed throughout this volume to reinforce student understanding, with over 600 end-of-chapter problems (including solutions for instructors), 100 figures, 180 solved examples, datasets and downloadable Matlab code. Supported by sister volumes Inference and Learning, and unique in its scale and depth, this textbook sequence is ideal for early-career researchers and graduate students across many courses in signal processing, machine learning, statistical analysis, data science and inference.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Geometric Science of Information, GSI 2013, held in Paris, France, in August 2013. The nearly 100 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions and are organized into the following thematic sessions: Geometric Statistics on Manifolds and Lie Groups, Deformations in Shape Spaces, Differential Geometry in Signal Processing, Relational Metric, Discrete Metric Spaces, Computational Information Geometry, Hessian Information Geometry I and II, Computational Aspects of Information Geometry in Statistics, Optimization on Matrix Manifolds, Optimal Transport Theory, Probability on Manifolds, Divergence Geometry and Ancillarity, Entropic Geometry, Tensor-Valued Mathematical Morphology, Machine/Manifold/Topology Learning, Geometry of Audio Processing, Geometry of Inverse Problems, Algebraic/Infinite dimensional/Banach Information Manifolds, Information Geometry Manifolds, and Algorithms on Manifolds.