Interacting with Statistics: Business Supplement

Book Information

Full Description:

As a generalisation, researchers tend to be interested in data (from an investigation) which is collected at that point in time, whereas businesses tend to be interested in data which enables them to make year-on-year comparisons (of profits, market share etc.). What this supplement does is to take procedures, from the original text, and adapt them to moving data sets. (The kind of data principally used in business.)
For this supplement, Mark Taylor has not simply used examples from business to illustrate the statistical procedures explained in his original text (Interacting with Statistics), he has produced a supplementary text which is a step-by-step manual to the variations on those (statistical) procedures, in order to account for the fundamental difference in the data (sets) used by businesses and researchers, principally moving data sets.

Given the fact that one of the objectives of the original book was to show the logical progression from one statistical procedure to another, it would have been difficult to maintain the consistency of this structure, while occasionally going off at a tangent, in order to explain how the procedure(s) can be adapted to moving data sets. For this reason, it has been necessary to produce a separate supplement for what can generally be called ‘business statistics’.

This supplement also includes a very accessible illustration of how businesses can make use of multivariate statistics (part of Mark Taylor’s philosophy of making statistical procedures intelligible and accessible to al

Table of Contents:

Describing and Predicting Moving Data 1
Introduction Business/Academic Distinction 1
Locating Scores within a Distribution 3
Moving Averages 11
Trends and Seasonal Adjustments 15
Interactions and Multivariate Analyses 31
Conclusion 39
References 40

Author Information:

Mark Taylor has an extensive background in data analysis/research methods, including an M.Sc. in Research Methods in the Social Sciences, a post-graduate diploma in Applied Research Methods, several years’ experience of teaching research methods/data analysis at university level, and he also helped to design and administer the performance indicator system for Essex Police. He has worked and studied at a number of higher education institutions in the UK and the United States, including traditional universities, such as Lancaster and Cambridge, new universities, such as South Bank, Thames Valley and Middlesex, the University of Colorado, and several years’ as a residential schools’ tutor at the Open University.
As well as the above mentioned Masters degree and post-graduate diploma, he has degrees in Psychology (Lancaster and Colorado) and Criminology (University of Cambridge, Institute of Criminology), as well as a B/Tec National Diploma in Business and Finance (with distinction), and a recognised (City and Guilds) teaching qualification.

The Interactive CD Rom, which accompanies this text, was also designed and produced by him at the computer animation studio which he established and now runs, as part of his on-going commitment to education and e-learning.