Ch 1. Overview
Please read this NY Times article.
In a nutshell, statistics is the study of data analysis.
Software used
Microsoft Excel and StatTools Add-in
Chapters 2 & 3: Descriptive statistics
"Make sense of data"
Organizations are now able to collect huge amounts of raw data. The question then becomes,
what does it all mean?
ographical and tabular summaries
onumerical summary measures such as means, medians, and standard deviations
The material in these two chapters is elementary from a mathematical point of view, but it is extremely
important.
Chapters 4 & 5: Probability
Uncertainty is a key aspect of most business problems. To deal with uncertainty, we need a basic
understanding of probability.
Chapter 4 covers basic rules of probability and then discusses the extremely important concept of
probability distributions.
Chapter 5 follows up this discussion by focusing on two of the most important probability
distributions: the normal and binomial distributions.
Chapters 7, 8 & 9: Statistical inference
Here the basic problem is to estimate one or more characteristics of a population.
It is usually too expensive or time consuming to learn about the entire population
oTherefore, we select a random sample from the population. (Chapter 7)
