This proceedings volume grew out of the Workshop Analytical Methods in
Statistics (AMISTAT 2015) which was held in Prague during November 10–13,
2015. The workshop was organized by the Fulbright Commission in Prague, which
hosted Prof. Abram Kagan as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the Charles
University, together with the American Center in Prague which made their lecture
halls available for the workshop; our special thanks belong to both, the American
Center and the Fulbright Commission.

The workshop brought together many interesting points and discussions on sta-
tistical decisions, arising from new problems everyday. We appreciate that young
people could meet famous experts in the area and listen to their talks. The contri-
butions dealing with current points of interest and with exciting open problems were
presented by scholars from Belgium, France, Germany, India, Israel, Norway,
Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Sweden, UK, USA, and the Czech Republic. A part of these
contributions, by those authors who considered their analyses as temporarily finished,
is contained in the present book. The joint motto of the talks and all discussions was
the “analytical statistics”. It emphasizes that the statistics provides mathematicians
with challenging and exciting problems, because it obtains its problems from the
real-life activities. For such problems one can rarely determine any axioms, and new
problems appear every day. The statisticians utilize knowledge from all parts of
mathematics, from those very abstract to numerical computation and interpretation
of the results. Moreover, every statistician is expected to find a solution to a real
problem and would not afford to reply that the optimal solution does not exist. He/she
should look at least for a solution optimal under acceptable constraints, and to find it is
again a challenge. Even thinking mathematically he/she has a feedback of practicality
of the conclusions in mind.