Unhappy with the traditional books on the topic, Kvam and Vidakovic wrote the text to suit diverse groups of students with mathematical, programming, and statistical backgrounds. Their book is largely intended for use in graduate courses and as a reference text.

Interspersed with photographs and amusing biographical comments about statisticians, the book successfully provides a balance of the formal and informal. Kvam and Vidakovic include basic background information in order for the reader to effectively learn and apply methods of nonparametric analysis.

The bulk of the chapters consist of both Bayesian and Order statistics, various tests and experiments, estimation techniques, algorithms, and statistical learning. The last sections offer an overview of MATLAB, an interactive environment that allows the user to perform computational tasks and create graphical output, and WinBUGS, software used for constructing Bayesian statistical models and evaluating them using MCMC methodology.

Paul H. Kvam is a Professor at the Institute's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He has been an integral member of ISyE faculty since 1995. Dr. Kvam holds a PhD in Statistics from the University of California, Davis and is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has published over 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals in statistics and engineering.

Brani Vidakovic is a Professor at both the Georgia Tech's Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and Emory University's Department of Biostatistics. Dr. Vidakovic holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Purdue University. He is a member of the American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis.

Nonparametric Statistics with Applications to Science and Engineering was published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, in 2007.