Transcript Introduction

Applied Business Forecasting
and Regression Analysis
Introduction
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.
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.
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.
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.
The organization of this course
• The lectures, homework assignments, worksheets, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.