Virtually every functional area of business makes use of data. Business statistics is the science of informed decision making in the face of uncertainty and is used in many disciplines such as financial analysis, econometrics, auditing, production, process improvement and marketing research. A typical business statistics course covers descriptive statistics (collection, description, analysis, and summary of data), probability distributions, sampling distributions, confidence intervals and tests of hypotheses, analysis of variance, correlation and linear regression, time series and statistical applications in quality management. We will follow American Statistical Association guidelines for making statistics more effective in business schools by focusing on statistical thinking, and result interpretation and not just on statistical methods and calculations.
Course objectives
1. To learn descriptive analysis to convert data into information. As a businessperson you must understand the language of statistics because statistics will help you collect, organize, analyze and obtain information from data so that you can make good decisions.
2. To learn statistical inference and regression analysis.
This course is designed so that all of the important business-related topics in applied statistics can be introduced in two weeks. Do not however, expect to be fluent in statistics in just two weeks - there are hundreds of highly specialized methodologies in statistics, and they cannot all be studied in such a short period of time. We will use the statistical capabilities Microsoft Excel to reduce your calculation burden and further improve your familiarity with this software.

Expected learning outcomes
After you complete this course, you will be able to do the following:
1. Analyze a data set using the appropriate statistical technique.
2. Present the results of the analysis and explain the managerial implication.
3. Use Microsoft Excel to perform statistical analysis and support presentations.