Basic Business Statistics: A Casebook

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. "The manuscripts are divided into "classes" which tackle various statistical concepts. Material becomes increasingly complex as the data in later sections exhibit multiple deviations from ideal conditions. The casebooks use a combination of explanatory text and software output to guide the student. Almost no mathematics appears in these volumes; the authors make traditional texts available to their students who are curious about the technical details...I anticipate students will wholeheartedly endorse the FSW casebooks. The material is easy to digest as, for instance, the authors cleverly interweave probability, the standard error of the mean, and control charts. The casebooks effectively relay the message that statistics is relevant and doable. Ideally, that is the message that should be sent in all introductory business statistics courses." Marlene Smith, University of Colorado-Denver

Author(s): Dean P. Foster, Robert A. Stine, Richard P. Waterman