Business Statistics

This unit is designed to prepare students for studies in Business with appropriate basic knowledge, skills and understanding so that they become familiar with terminology and statistical concepts, and are able to apply these at an elementary level. Furthermore, students completing the unit successfully will be prepared for further statistical knowledge developed in the context of specialised electives. They will be familiar with statistical terminology and well prepared to develop specific statistical techniques at more advanced levels if required to do so. To this end, students will be encouraged to explore a broad range of techniques during each teaching session and will be trained to pinpoint a specific statistical method to analyse a given business problem. Students will be introduced to: the rationale to apply statistics to business decisions and describing economic data by applying appropriate statistical techniques. Topics include: probability and probability distributions; normal probability distribution; sampling distributions and parameter estimation; hypotheses testing; linear regression and correlation; time-series analysis and forecasting; index numbers. Use will be made of a statistical computer package. The successful completion of the unit will enable students to visualise the business world from a scientific and quantitative perspective and will equip students to minimise the risk of subjective decision.