BNAD 276 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Descriptive Statistics, Statistical Parameter

• School: University of Arizona
• Department: Business Administration
• Course: BNAD 276
• Professor: brentmarinan

Document Summary

Avoid risk of making uninformed decisions and costly mistakes. The methodology of extracting useful information from a data set. Clearly communicate numerical info into written language. Drawing conclusions about a population based on sample data from that population. Descriptive turn inferential----descriptive stats are used to make statistical claims about a population. Calculated from the sample data and is used to make inferences about the population parameter. Descriptive becomes inferential when taking info about sample and applying it to population. Too expensive to gather info on entire population. Often impossible to gather info on the entire population. Data collected by recording a characteristic of many subject at the same point in time, or without regard to differences in time. Subject might include individuals, households, firms, industries, regions, and countries. The survey data from the introductory case is an example of cross- sectional data. Data collected by recording over several time periods. Can include daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual observations.