Course Curriculum

Week 1: Exploring Data Analysis

An introductory overview of the key concepts and techniques for analyzing data.

NOTE: Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, the workload will be lighter and some of these areas may be pushed to Week 2.

Topics Covered:

• Statistical Definitions & Data Types: Understanding the type of data is essential to understanding what tools one can use to analyze it. You'll cover some basic sorting, frequency distributions and contingency tables. We will use pivot tables for the latter two topics.
• Data Visualization:  You'll work to create the appropriate visual display with the appropriate labeling. A good visual display can help make your point clearly without a lot of confusing numbers and technical terms. It also does not have language barriers, so it can be effective with any kind of audience.
• Descriptive Statistics:  We'll identify how data clusters, shapes, and can be distorted, covering some handy tools and guidelines that will serve you well when taking your first look at a data set.
• Basic Probability:  Percentages and probabilities are used in everyday life and they are even more important in business.

Week 2: Sampling and Estimation

Continuing on the work with probability, focusing on two continuous probability distributions; the uniform and the normal.

Topics Covered:

• Properties of the Uniform & Normal Distribution:  The uniform has a rectangular shape and is useful when representing purely random events. Understanding some of the fundamentals of the normal (also known as a bell curve) distribution is also a key element in understanding how to analyze business data.
• Survey & Sampling:  You'll cover the basics of surveying and go through an overview of the process of sampling.
• Confidence Interval for Means and Proportions:  You’ll learn how two different confidence intervals can be used to estimate sales for a new business venture or our new product.
• Business Application

Week 3: Hypothesis Testing 

You'll cover hypothesis testing, one of the more challenging topics in statistics.

Topics Covered:

• Hypothesis Testing Basics:  What it is, how it's evolved, and how hypothesis tests can relate to various growing business markets.
• Hypothesis Testing for Means & Proportions:  We'll go through the step-by-step process of creating and performing tests for means and proportions – think percentages – and we'll do this in Excel. This all leads up to the “p-value” - a common metric that is applied to all hypothesis tests.
• Errors:  We'll cover some of the various errors that occur with hypothesis testing and the business implications that may result from those errors.

Week 4: Linear Models

We'll move away from the more statistical topics to talk about linear equations. We will still rely heavily on Excel to crunch the numbers and will build off of what we’ve learned thus far.

Topics Covered:

• Finding the Equation of a Line
• Revenue, Cost
• Profit and Breakeven Models
• Supply and Demand
• Piecewise Models