Lectures on probability and statistics, revision

These notes are based on a set of statistics lectures delivered at Imperial College to the first-year postgraduate students in High Energy Physics. They are designed for the professional experimental scientist. We begin with the fundamentals of probability theory, in which one makes statements about the set of possible outcomes of an experiment, based upon a complete a priori understanding of the experiment. For example, in a roll of a set of (fair) dice, one understands a priori that any given side of each die is equally likely to turn up. From that, we can calculate the probability of any specified outcome. We finish with the inverse problem, statistics. Here, one begins with a set of actual data (e.g., the outcomes of a number of rolls of the dice), and attempts to make inferences about the state of nature which gave those data (e.g., the likelihood of seeing any given side of any given die turn up). This a much more difficult problem, of course, and one's solutions often turn out to be unsatisfactory in one respect or another.