This SIAM Classics edition is an unabridged, corrected republication of the work first published in 1977. It provides a compendium of applied aspects of ordering and selection procedures and includes tables that permit the practitioner to carry out the experiment and draw statistically justified conclusions. These tables are not readily available in other texts. Although more than 1000 papers and several books on the general theory of ranking and selection have been published since this book first appeared, the methodology is presented in a more elementary fashion with numerous examples to help the reader apply it to a specific problem. There is a dichotomy in modern statistics that distinguishes between analyses done before an experiment is completed and those done afterward. Ranking and selection methods are useful in both of these categories. The authors provide an alternative to the overused "testing the null hypothesis" when what the practitioner really needs is a method of ranking "k" given populations, selecting the "t" best populations, or some similar goal. That need and purpose is as important today as when the subject was first developed nearly 50 years ago.
Chapter 1: The Philosophy of Selecting and Ordering Populations Chapter 2: Selecting the One Best Population for Normal Distributions with Common Known Variance Chapter 3: Selecting the One Best Population for Other Normal Distribution Models Chapter 4: Selecting the One Best Population Bionomial (or Bernoulli) Distributions Chapter 5: Selecting the One Normal Population with the Smallest Variance Chapter 6: Selecting the One Best Category for the Multinomial Distribution Chapter 7: Nonparametric Selection Procedures Chapter 8: Selection Procedures for a Design with Paired Comparisons Chapter 9: Selecting the Normal Population with the Best Regression Value Chapter 10: Selecting Normal Populations Better than a Control Chapter 11: Selecting the t Best Out of k Populations Chapter 12: Complete Ordering of k Populations Chapter 13: Subset Selection (or Elimination) Procedures Chapter 14: Selecting the Best Gamma Population Chapter 15: Selection Procedures for Multivariate Normal Distributions Appendix A: Tables for Normal Means Selection Problems Appendix B: Figures for Normal Means Selection Problems Appendix C: Table of the Cumulative Standard Normal Distribution ?(z) Appendix D: Table of Critical Values for the Chi-Square Distribution Appendix E: Tables for Binomial Selection Problems Appendix F: Figures for Binomial Selection Problems Appendix G: Tables for Normal Variances Selection Problems Appendix H: Tables for Multinomial Selection Problems Appendix I: Curtailment Tables for the Multinomial Selection Problem Appendix J: Tables of the Incomplete Beta Function Appendix K: Tables for Nonparametric Selection Problems Appendix L: Tables for Paired-Comparison Selection Problems Appendix M: Tables for Selecting from k Normal Populations Those Better Than a Control Appendix N: Tables for Selecting the t Best Normal Populations Appendix O: Table of Critical Values of Fisher's F Distribution Appendix P: Tables for Complete Ordering Problems Appendix Q: Tables for Subset Selection Problems Appendix R: Tables for Gamma Distribution Problems Appendix S: Tables for Multivariate Selection Problems Appendix T: Excerpt of Table of Random Numbers Appendix U: Table of Squares and Square Roots Bibliography References for Applications Index for Data and Examples Name Index Subject Index.
