The Essentials of Studying Statistics

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The Essentials of Studying Statistics

Introduction

Making effective business decisions are always based on cost, time and prospect. Calculating money cost, time cost and forecast of return, all are based on marketing research, data mining, information analysis and findings. The way of the finding the answer is statistics.

Statistics – The Method of Organizing Data

Broadly, statistics is a set of disciplines for study quantitative information. Implied that several methods used to collect or process or interpret quantitative data from large amount of information, then finally generate a calculated number, for example average, mean, standard deviation…etc. All of these are the key reference for decision making or predicting consequences. Thus, it enables us to estimate the extent of our errors.

Statistics was primely developed in 17th century. It was initially used in collecting population and recourses information of United States. But now, statistics is widely applied in various fields after hundred years of progress. Today, few professional activities are untouched by statistical thinking. However, only statistics itself cannot give any conclusions and findings. It is significant when complied with other subjects or studies resulted in numerous of different independent disciplines were developed, for example Environmental Health Statistics, Biostatistics and Economics Statistics, etc.

Beside scholars, many decisions that business managers make involve data and for analysing problems, describing policies and programs, monitoring progress, improving program operations and evaluating outcome. A new breed of number cruncher, Super Cruncher, analysed large amount of data and discover the correlation between them. Th...

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...ere: your mobile services, latest credit card offers and even the placement of products in supermarket.

Statistics enables us to organize and arrange a basket of data, to link up their relationships by using calculation and diagrams, to analyze the results, finally evaluate errors, generate conclusion from small group to large group. You can prove what you want by statistics, but it really sometimes lies by tricky stratified sampling, distorted graphs and dimness figures.

Reference

Evan M. Berman (2007). Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts. CQ Press.

Ian Ayres (2007). SUPER CRUNCHING Why thinking-by-numbers is the new way to be smart . A Bantam Book

Derek Rowntree (2004) Statistics Without Tears A primer for non-mathematicians. Person Education Inc.

Darrell Huff (1993) How To Lie With Statistics W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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