Jim Albert's Home Page

James H. Albert
Professor of Mathematics and Statistics
Bowling Green State University

email: albert@math.bgsu.edu
office: 407 Math Science
phone: (419)-372-7456

COURSES (FALL 2008)

MATH 400 Introduction to Statistical Thinking

Dataset and R files

MATH 447/547 Exploratory Data Analysis

Folder of R functions, Fathom files, and datasets

BOOKS/SOFTWARE:

Teaching Statistics Using Baseball (published by the Mathematical Association of America)	Curve Ball: Baseball, Statistics, and the Role of Chance in the Game (with Jay Bennett)
*Workshop Statistics: Discovery with Data, A Bayesian Approach* (with Allan Rossman)	Ordinal Data Modeling (with Val Johnson) MATLAB TOOLBOX
*Bayesian Computation with R*	Bayesian Computation Using Minitab

Academic History:

I received my bachelor degree in math from Bucknell University in 1975 and my doctoral degree in statistics from Purdue University in 1979. I have been a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Bowling Green State University since 1979. I've had two sabbaticals: 1986-87 at the University of Southampton (England) and 1994-95 at Duke University.

My Academic Interests:

Click here for my vita and list of my publications and technical reports.

Bayesian inference.
Bayesian statistics is based on two ideas. First, uncertainty about unknown quantities is expressed using the language of subjective probability, and, given new information or data, probabilities are updated using Bayes rule. I believe that Bayesian inferential methods have advantages over classical statistical procedures for a wide range of inferential problems.

The analysis of sports data.
I've been a baseball fan for many years -- I follow the Phillies when they are playing well. (I don't have to follow them that often!) Baseball is especially interesting for me, due the large amount of data that is collected about the game.
Click here for a introduction to Sabermetrics (the statistical analysis of baseball records).

Teaching statistics.
I believe that we can do a much better job of communicating the basic notions of statistics in a beginning course. We are currently teaching elementary statistics class using classroom activities and a Bayesian perspective and the results are encouraging. Also, I am experimenting with teaching statistics from a sports perspective, and am developing data analysis and probability courses for prospective teachers.

Page Author: Jim Albert
Revised: August 18, 208