Applied Business Forecasting and Regression Analysis

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Applied Business Forecasting and Regression
Analysis

• Introduction

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Introduction

• Statistics is a discipline of scientific
  reasoning under conditions of uncertainty.
• It has to do with
• Designing a appropriate data-collection strategy
  or an experiment.
• Making sense of the collected information through
• Plots and tables
• Numerical summaries
• Make inference about a population from a
  relatively small random sample of that
  population.
• Modeling the relationship between variables and
  if it proves successful use it for prediction.
• Using historical data to develop models for
  forecasting the future.
• Reporting the results of your statistical
  analysis.
• This is not a mathematics course, but
  mathematical concepts will be used.

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Introduction

• You will find that statistical thinking a new and
  different type of mental discipline.
• It will take some time and effort to get
  comfortable with it.
• You will not be able to learn this material
  passively, any more than you could learn to play
  piano or football just by watching someone else
  do it.

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Introduction

• Expect this course to be challenging but
  interesting (I hope).
• In every lecture, I will follow the textbook
  fairly closely, but expect to find something
  extra that you will not find in the text.
• You will be responsible for these in exams and
  other class work.

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Introduction

• There will be worksheets in some lectures to go
  over in class.
• The work you do on these will be extra credit.
• You will lose your opportunity to earn extra
  credit if you miss a class.
• Some of the problems on these worksheets will
  closely resemble the homework problems, and
  problems on the tests.

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The organization of this course

• The lectures, homework assignments, work-sheets,
  and computer lab sessions are all carefully
  planned to support each other and to prepare you
  for exams.
• The disruption of the timing of any of these
  course components, will significantly reduce your
  chances of success in this course.

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The organization of this course

• Alternatively, attending lectures, and working
  on assigned home-work problems regularly, will
  increase your chances of success in this course.

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How this course works

• A cookbook approach in which you try to
  memorize the right formula for a word problem
  will not help you to succeed in this course.
  Instead, thinking things through from the
  beginning of the course and understanding the
  concepts will pay big dividends by the end of the
  semester.

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How this course works

• Statistics is often thought of as a math course,
  but in reality English is at least as important
  as math. We use English to interpret the meaning
  of numbers we calculate and writing a report of
  our findings.
• Difficulty with word problems in previous math
  courses does not inhibit your success in DS-303
  because the concepts we need are built from the
  very beginning of the course.

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How this course works

• I have noted that students who work alone
  sometimes feel isolated and struggle with the
  course. Students who work together with a study
  partner or in a study group tend to succeed more
  readily.
• If you miss a lecture, get the notes from your
  study partner.

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How this course works

• All the lecture notes will be posted on the
  course web page.
• http//faculty.wiu.edu/F-Dehkordi/
• It is your responsibility to make your own
  copies.

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What can we hope to accomplish?

• To learn several commonly used statistical
  procedures for organizing and describing data.
• To learn the formal methods for drawing
  conclusions from properly produced data and use
  the language of probability to describe how
  reliable the conclusions are.
• To learn methods of inference dealing with
  relationship among two or more variables.

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What can we hope to accomplish?

• To learn time series models used in identifying
  patterns and their applications in forecasting
  procedures.
• To gain practical experience through hands on
  use of computer programs in your study of these
  statistical methods.
• To learn the basics of writing a statistical
  analysis report.

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What to expect

• You learn statistics by doing statistical
  problems.
• To learn a new concept and master it you need to
• Be persistent
• Be organized
• Practice, practice, practice
• The gain will be worth the pain.