Synopses & Reviews
Providing an introduction to modern data analysis techniques, these casebooks can be used as the primary or secondary text for elementary business statistics courses. Statistics has the reputation of being a boring, complicated, and confusing mix of mathematical formulas accompanied by computers used to do something. This casebook nad its companion volume Business Analysis Usuing Regression change that impression by showing how statistics gives insights and ansswers interesting business questions.The material is organized into classes of related case studies that develop a single key idea of statistics. The authors begin by discussing an application that motivates the key idea. Students are then shown how to analyze a data set. The emphasis of the analysis is to answer important business questions with statistics rather than talk about statistics.Basic Business Statistics introduces ideas often not emphasized in elementary texts such as issues of robustness, the use of transformations to simplify problems, sampling bias, confounding, kernel density, quality control, and scatterplot matrices. Business Analysis with Regression includes a discussion of scatterplot smoothing, prediction intervals for new observations, collinearity, logistic regression, nonlinear models, and multiple comparisons in regression.The text includes directions for data analyses with JMP and an appendix with Minitab commands.Professors Dean P. Foster, Robert A. Stine, and Richard P. Waterman are members of the Department of Statistics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Synopsis
Preface Statistics is seldom the most eagerly anticipated course of a business student. It typically has the reputation ofbeing aboring, complicated, and confusing mix of mathematical formulas and computers. Our goal in writing this casebook and the companion volume (Basic Business Statistics) was to change that impression by showing how statistics gives insights and answers interesting business questions. Rather than dwell on underlying formulas, we show how to use statistics to answer questions. Each case study begins with a business question and concludes with an answer. Formulas appear only as needed to address the questions, and we focus on the insights into the problem provided by the mathematics. The mathematics serves a purpose. The material is organized into 12 "classes" of related case studies that develop a single, key idea of statistics. The analysis of data using statistics is seldom very straightforward, and each analysis has many nuances. Part ofthe appeal ofstatistics is this richness, this blending of substantive theories and mathematics. For a newcomer, however, this blend is too rich and they are easily overwhelmed and unable to sort out the important ideas from nuances. Although later cases in these notes suggest this complexity, we do not begin that way. Each class has one main idea, something big like standard error. We begin a class by discussing an application chosen to motivate this key concept, and introduce the necessary terminology.
Synopsis
This is the follow-up casebook to "Basic Business Statistics", taking readers beyond an introduction to more complex techniques such as regression, fitting equations to data, categorical factors, and modeling time series data. Like its predecessor, the book provides the latest in data analysis techniques, and includes a discussion of JMP and Minitab commands. 183 illus.