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There have been a few questions about statistical textbooks, such as the question Free statistical textbooks. However, I am looking for textbooks that are Open Source, for example, having an Creative Commons license. The reason is that in course material in other domains, you still want to include some text about basic statistics. In this case, it would be interesting to reuse existing material, instead of rewriting that material.

Therefore, what Open Source textbooks on statistics (and perhaps machine learning) are available?

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  • $\begingroup$ On the other hand, can a book be open source? It rather applies to code, so probably the better word is "open book". $\endgroup$
    – user88
    Commented Jul 25, 2010 at 15:08
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    $\begingroup$ The site that is very close to open-source statistical handbook is stats.stackexchange.com :) $\endgroup$
    – Tim
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 19:38

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Try IPSUR, Introduction to Probability and Statistics Using R by G. Jay Kerns. It's "free, in the GNU sense of the word".

http://ipsur.r-forge.r-project.org/book/

It's definitely open source - on the download page you can download the LaTeX source or the lyx source used to generate this.

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Michael Lavine: Introduction to Statistical Thought, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Multivariate statistics with R

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    $\begingroup$ Thi is a broken link $\endgroup$
    – Fran
    Commented Aug 11, 2014 at 2:11
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    $\begingroup$ Does this refer to Paul Hewson's book Multivariate Statistics with R (2009, 177 pages)? $\endgroup$
    – Tsundoku
    Commented Oct 6, 2016 at 19:18
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The "Statistics" book on wikibooks

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OpenIntro Statistics is available via CC BY-SA. The LaTeX source code plus the R code to generate every figure in the textbook is also readily available in a single download.

OpenIntro's website also highlights several other freely available statistics textbooks$^\dagger$ at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels.

$^\dagger$ not working anymore.

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Street-Fighting Mathematics. The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving by Sanjoy Mahajan from MIT. Available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Share Alike license.

Available as a free download on the MIT Press website (but not from the author's website).

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Statistical Analysis with the General Linear Model

It covers basic linear models (ANOVA, ANCOVA, multiple regression). I can tell by personal experience that it is really really good book to get into the general framework of linear models, which are very useful in many advanced approaches (e.g., hierarchical modeling).

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    $\begingroup$ This is Creative Commons but does not allow derivates... :( That way, I cannot use the bits in my own course material, just the bits I need them to know... $\endgroup$
    – Egon Willighagen
    Commented Jul 28, 2010 at 11:00
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R programming wiki book

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Some googling found Statistics & Probability on CollegeOpenTextbooks.org. Still, be aware that most of CC-ed material is share-aliked (so you must also publish your work on CC) or at least attributed (so you must add info that certain part was copied and from whom). The same works with GFDL (both SA & A), it is even worse since in principle you should print it along with the document.

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Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning (by David Barber, Cambridge University Press) has an online version which is freely available, but without any mention to a specific license. However, the Instructors Material page seems to imply that the exercises in the book can be used as teaching material, if that is what you are looking for.

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Look at Statistics Topics ebook on Amazon by Mehta, and his free web log Statistics Ideas that has lecture slides. Nearly free and better in some pedagogical topics, than the ones you cite on your list of resources.

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    $\begingroup$ Does it have a creative commons license or something similar, like the question asked? $\endgroup$
    – Glen_b
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 0:51

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