Preface of the "3rd symposium on Distribution Theory, Estimation and Inference"

‘Distribution Theory' is here taken in the sense it is used in the books "Kendall's Advanced Theory of Statistics, Volume 1 - Distribution Theory" (6th ed.) by Alan Stuart and Keith Ord, or "Advances in Distribution Theory, Order Statistics and Inference", edited by N. Balakrishnan, Enrique Castillo and Jose-Maria Sarabia, as the area in Statistics which deals with all aspects of the study of statistical distributions. Multivariate Analysis, Linear and Non-linear Models, Order Statistics and Extreme Value Theory are key areas where works on the study of the exact, asymptotic or near-exact distributions of the associated test statistics and parameter estimators are of major importance. This way, ‘Estimation' and ‘Inference' come along as natural associated fields. Not to be left out is also the study and development of nonparametric tests and associated statistics, namely their behavior when different underlying population distributions are assumed. It was in all these areas that this Symposium was able to congregate a number of interesting presentations, the most of them brought by young statisticians.