Differential Geometry and Statistics

Book excerpt: Ever since the introduction by Rao in 1945 of the Fisher information metric on a family of probability distributions, there has been interest among statisticians in the application of differential geometry to statistics. This interest has increased rapidly in the last couple of decades with the work of a large number of researchers. Until now an impediment to the spread of these ideas into the wider community of statisticians has been the lack of a suitable text introducing the modern coordinate free approach to differential geometry in a manner accessible to statisticians. Differential Geometry and Statistics aims to fill this gap. The authors bring to this book extensive research experience in differential geometry and its application to statistics. The book commences with the study of the simplest differentiable manifolds - affine spaces and their relevance to exponential families, and goes on to the general theory, the Fisher information metric, the Amari connections and asymptotics. It culminates in the theory of vector bundles, principal bundles and jets and their applications to the theory of strings - a topic presently at the cutting edge of research in statistics and differential geometry.