  What is Statistics? Opinions vary. In fact, there is a continuous spectrum of
attitudes toward statistics ranging from pure theoreticians, proving asymptotic
efficiency and searching for most powerful tests, to wild practitioners,
blindly reporting p-values and claiming statistical significance for
scientifically insignificant results. In these notes statistics is viewed as a
branch of mathematical engineering, that studies ways of extracting reliable
information from limited data for learning, prediction, and decision making in
the presence of uncertainty. These ACM lecture notes are based on the courses
the author taught at the University of Southern California in 2012 and 2013,
and at the California Institute of Technology in 2016.
