The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. 'The book is a valuable completion of the literature in this field. It is written in an ambitious mathematical style and can be recommended to statisticians as well as biostatisticians.' -Biometrische Zeitschrift 'Not many books manage to combine convincingly topics from probability theory over mathematical statistics to applied statistics. This is one of them. The book has other strong points to recommend it: it is written with meticulous care, in a lucid style, general results being illustrated by examples from statistical theory and practice, and a bunch of exercises serve to further elucidate and elaborate on the