Interest in statistical methodology is increasing so rapidly in theastronomical community that accessible introductory material in this area islong overdue. Thi... » 

Interest in statistical methodology is increasing so rapidly in theastronomical community that accessible introductory material in this area islong overdue. This book fills the gap by providing a presentation of the mostuseful techniques in multivariate statistics. br A wideranging annotated setof general and astronomical bibliographic references follows each chapterproviding valuable entrypoints for research workers in all astronomical subdisciplines. br Although the applications considered focus on astronomy thealgorithms used can be applied to similar problems in other branches ofscience. Fortran programs are provided for many of the methods described. «