Tag: Descriptive statistics

Choose an article from the newspaper, an online source, or a magazine, then identify the descriptive statistics included in the article. Were the statisitcs appropriately described in the article? Explain. Discuss if the descriptive statistics used in your source supported the arguments made in it. Were the descriptive statistics misleading? Explain.

Choose an article from the newspaper, an online source, or a magazine, then identify the descriptive statistics included in the article. Were the statisitcs appropriately described in the article? Explain. Discuss if the descriptive statistics used in your source supported the arguments made in it. Were the descriptive statistics misleading? Explain.

Provide you a learning experience of working in a team with random people. This will
be a real-life experience to be expected when you graduate and start working – you do not get to choose
who you work with. Please keep your mind open, as you may also make new friends with this project.
Working as a team, please keep the following in mind:
• Team members should meet to make sure the project moves with progress.
• Before your FIRST meeting, all team members are expected to read the assignment and look
through the dataset.
• Upon completion, team members will evaluate the contributions of each member to the group
effort. The evaluations will be confidential.
You will apply what you have learned in this course to a real-world data problem. All teams will work on
the same business case. The goal is to understand the problem domain and the data available to provide
insight on analytical results. You will explore how best to use business analytics methods to transform data
into business decisions and communicate of the results and insights from the analysis. You will use the
techniques you learn in the following sections in the textbook:
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Descriptive Statistics
• Chapter 3: Data Visualization
• Section 8.4: Using Regression Analysis for Forecasting
• Section 10.3: Some Useful Excel Functions for Modeling

Discuss your experience with descriptive statistics such as the mean, median, and mode as well as graphs and figures like a histogram or pie chart. How are descriptive statistics useful in your life and career?

Examine basic descriptive statistics, and demonstrate results using calculated values and statistical charts.
Instructions
Scenario (information repeated for deliverable 01, 03, and 04)
A major client of your company is interested in the salary distributions of jobs in the state of Minnesota that range from $30,000 to $200,000 per year. As a Business Analyst, your boss asks you to research and analyze the salary distributions. You are given a spreadsheet that contains the following information:
A listing of the jobs by title
The salary (in dollars) for each job
The client needs the preliminary findings by the end of the day, and your boss asks you to first compute some basic statistics.
Background information on the Data
The data set in the spreadsheet consists of 364 records that you will be analyzing from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The data set contains a listing of several jobs titles with yearly salaries ranging from approximately $30,000 to $200,000 for the state of Minnesota.
What to Submit
Your boss wants you to submit the spreadsheet with the completed calculations. Your research and analysis should be present within the answers provided on the worksheet

prepare the first part of your analytics report by creating graphs and calculating some descriptive statistics. In this assessment, you will write your 5-8 page analytics report by interpreting those graphs and statistics, and explicitly connecting those interpretations to implications in the practical business context.

The first step in creating meaningful information from raw data is to represent the data effectively in graphical format and to calculate any required statistics. The second step is interpreting and explaining those graphs and statistics in order to apply them in the business context.

In the previous assessment, you were asked to create the first part of your analytics report by preparing graphs and calculating some descriptive statistics. In this assessment, you will complete your analytics report by interpreting those graphs and statistics, and connecting those interpretations explicitly to implications in the business context.

In business and applied analytics, oftentimes you are interested in drawing conclusions about a population of interest. However, it may not be feasible or practical to gather data on the entire population. In those cases, data is gathered from a sample or subset of the population. Analyses done on the sample are then used to draw inferences regarding the overall population; this mathematic process is referred to asinferential statistics. In this assessment, we begin discussing the topics of sampling and drawing inferences.

All the inferential statistical techniques and methods covered in this course are considered parametric techniques and require certain assumptions to be used and for the results to be reliable, many of which are assumptions about an underlying distribution. Nonparametric techniques require no assumption about underlying distributions and are often used when the assumptions of parametric techniques are not met. Although these are beyond the scope of this introductory course, they are a great option for additional reading and research.

Analytics projects often result in two distinct types of reports or summaries: one tailored to the executive level, which takes the form of a presentation, and the other, a detailed analytics report, which documents an analysis so thoroughly that another analyst can reproduce the analysis exactly. Many times, the latter type is referred to by other departments or analysts wishing to conduct a similar analysis on similar data or by the same analyst who wants to repeat the analysis on a new or revised set of data. In this assessment, you will learn the essential elements that should be included in a report at this level of detail and you will create your own analytics report addressing the business problem you have been working on.

Scenario
The first step in creating meaningful information to develop a business report for decision making. The business report includes the analyzed raw data, effectively presents the analysis results in text and graphical format, as well as calculate any required statistics.

The second step is interpreting and explaining the graphs and statistics to understand the impact in the practical business context.

In the last assessment, you were asked to create the first part of your business analytics report by introducing a company, analyzing company stock data, developing graphs, and calculating some descriptive statistics.

In this assessment, you will adjust your business report to minimize limitations of one year’s worth of data. You will use the same company for this assessment and you will use 5 years of data!

You will also enhance your introduction or business context section of your business report based on your new graphs and your interpretation of the data graphs and descriptive statistics over a five year period. Your interpretation efforts of graphs and descriptive statistics will explicitly connect in the conclusion area. Conclusions and recommendations are the final effort in the development of a practical business report and should be supported by citations. Remember that opinion is not allowed.

Your Role
Your supervisor has asked you to prepare a report for the quarterly company meeting. The first part of the task was to download the data and create scatterplots and histograms, and to calculate mean, median, and mode of 5 years of stock prices for your report. Now you must analyze and interpret those graphical representations of the company stock and write the report of your findings and recommendations for your supervisor.

You are an analyst using the same company and five years of stock data. Having accessed the company data and placed it in an appropriate graphical format, you must now use descriptive statistics and analysis to develop a report to inform business decisions.

Instructions
After reviewing and integrating your instructor’s feedback on your previous Assessment, complete the report as follows:

For each graph you created, write at least one well supported paragraph interpreting the graph: What does that graph represent? What does the shape of the graph tell you about how the data have changed over time?
For each statistic you calculated, include at least two to three well-supported sentences explaining what the statistic represents:
What does the mean tell you? How do you know?
What does it imply if the median is different from the mean?
What does the standard deviation tell you about the volatility of the data?
Write a new conclusions section in which you explain how these interpretations can be used in the company:
What are some trends about which company leaders should be aware?
How might the information you have provided be used in decision making in the company?
What are other analysts indicating about the stock?
Explicitly connect other analysts’ comments and recommendations to your interpretations to possible impact to the business context