Ebook: Hand-book on statistical distributions for experimentalists

In experimental work e.g. in physics one often encounters problems where a standard statistical probability density function is applicable. It is often of great help to be able to handle these in different ways such as calculating probability contents or generating random numbers.
For these purposes there are excellent text-books in statistics e.g. the classical work of Maurice G. Kendall and Alan Stuart [1,2] or more modern text-books as [3] and others. Some books are particularly aimed at experimental physics or even specifically at particle physics [4,5,6,7,8]. Concerning numerical methods a valuable references worth mentioning is [9] which has been surpassed by a new edition [10]. Also hand-books, especially [11], has been of great help throughout.
However, when it comes to actual applications it often turns out to be hard to find detailed explanations in the literature ready for implementation. This work has been collected over many years in parallel with actual experimental work. In this way some material may be “historical” and sometimes be na ̈ıve and have somewhat clumsy solutions not always made in the mathematically most stringent may. We apologize for this but still hope that it will be of interest and help for people who is struggling to find methods to solve their statistical problems in making real applications and not only learning statistics as a course. Even if one has the skill and may be able to find solutions it seems worthwhile to have easy and fast access to formulæ ready for application. Similar books and reports exist e.g. [12,13] but we hope the present work may compete in describing more distributions, being more complete, and including more explanations on relations given.
The material could most probably have been divided in a more logical way but we have chosen to present the distributions in alphabetic order. In this way it is more of a hand-book than a proper text-book.
After the first release the report has been modestly changed. Minor changes to correct misprints is made whenever found. In a few cases subsections and tables have been added. These alterations are described on page 182. In October 1998 the first somewhat bigger revision was made where in particular a lot of material on the non-central sampling distributions were added.