1. What is the importance of statistics in business decision making? Describe a business situation where statistics was used in making a decision.
2. How would you define a variable? What is the difference between a dependent and independent variable? Do you think both variables are used in every research? Explain why or why not. Provide examples.
3. A bank is planning to raise the fees that it charges customers. It is concerned that the increase will cause some customers to move to other banks. It surveyed 300 customers.
Answer the following:
(a) Identify whether the data are cross sectional or a time series.
(b) Give a name to each variable and indicate if the variable is categorical, ordinal, or numerical (if a variable is numerical, include its units if possible).
(c) List any concerns that you might have for the accuracy of the data.
4. Consider this situation: A manager has partitioned the company's sales into six districts: North, East, South, Midwest, West, and international. What graph or table would you use to make these points in a presentation for management?
a. A figure that shows that slightly more than half of all sales are made in the West district
b. A figure that shows that sales topped $10 million in every district 4. Explain your answer. (In other words, why use the graph or table you've selected?)
5. Select an article from a news magazine or research journal where data is displayed in a pie or bar chart. Describe the data displayed in the chart and what conclusion you could draw.
6. Why it is important to find the shape of data distribution before computing descriptive statistics? Do all variables follow normal distribution? Explain why or why not. Explain with examples.
7. Can mean, median, or mode be calculated from all statistical data? Explain why or why not. When is the mean the best measure of central tendency? When is the median the best measure of central tendency?
8. Does a large chi-squared tell us that there is strong association between two categorical variables? Yes or No? Explain your answer.
9. Consider the following:If the categorical variable that identifies the supervising manager is associated with the categorical variable
that indicates a problem with processing orders, then the manager is causing the problems. Do you consider this true or false? Explain your answer.
10. I have found that if I buy a baseball hat for a sports team and wear it the first time on a day they are playing, that 82% of the time that team loses. Thus has happened in football, basketball, baseball and hockey. Some major upsets have occurred when I have done the above. Is there correlation? Why or why not? Is there causation? Why or why not?