Practical Business Statistics

Andrew F. Siegel holds the Grant I. Butterbaugh Professorship in Quantitative Methods and Finance at the Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, and is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics. His Ph.D. is in statistics from Stanford University (1977). Before settling in Seattle, he held teaching and/ or research positions at Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin, the RAND Corporation, the Smithsonian Institution, and Princeton University. He has taught statistics at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and earned seven teaching awards in 2015 and 2016. The interest-rate model he developed with Charles Nelson (the Nelson-Siegel Model) is in use at central banks around the world. His work has been translated into Chinese and Russian. His articles have appeared in many publications, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences, the American Statistician, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature, the American Mathematical Monthly, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Annals of Statistics, the Annals of Probability, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal on Scientific and Statistical Computing, Statistics in Medicine, Biometrika, Biometrics, Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology, Mathematical Finance, Contemporary Accounting Research, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Applied Probability.

1. Introduction: Defining the Role of Statistics in Business 2. Data Structures: Classifying the Various Types of Data Sets 3. Histograms: Looking at the Distribution of Data 4. Landmark Summaries: Interpreting Typical Values and Percentiles 5. Variability: Dealing with Diversity 6. Probability: Understanding Random Situations 7. Random Variables: Working with Uncertain Numbers 8. Random Sampling: Planning Ahead for Data Gathering 9. Confidence Intervals: Admitting that Estimates are not Exact 10. Hypothesis Testing: Deciding Between Reality and Coincidence 11. Correlation and Regression: Measuring and Predicting Relationships 12. Multiple Regression: Predicting One Factor from Several Others 13. Report Writing: Communicating the Results of a Multiple Regression 14. Time Series: Understanding Changes Over Time 15. Anova: Testing for Differences Among Many Samples, and Much More 16. Nonparametrics: Testing with Ordinal Data or Nonnormal Distributions 17. Chi-Squared Analysis: Testing for Patterns in Qualitative Data 18. Quality Control: Recognizing and Managing Variation App A. Employee Database App B. Donations Database App C. Self-Test: Solutions to Selected Problems and Database Exercises App D. Statistical Tables App E. Statpad Quick Reference Guide