GAS1751

Quantitative methods 1

Dr Richard Egudo, Dr Harmindar Nath and Dr David Wilson

6 points - First semester - 2 hours lectures and two 1-hour tutorials per week - Gippsland/Berwick/Distance - Prohibitions: MAT1060

Objectives The objectives of this subject are for students to learn some of the basic mathematical and statistical techniques used in analysis of business problems and in the decision making based on such analysis; develop skills in carrying out financial calculations for cases such as amortisation, sinking funds and equations of value; to be able to use linear, quadratic and logarithmic functions in business calculations; understand the collection and analysis of data using elementary statistical ideas, and to apply models based on the normal distribution to practical problems; be able to formulate and test hypotheses, and to use linear regression methods.

Synopsis Topics covered include basic mathematical concepts, functions and their graphs, exponential and logarithmic functions. Solutions of systems of linear equations and inequations and their applications. Financial calculations relating to simple and compound interest, annuities, amortisation, sinking funds and equations of value. Statistics - nature of statistical investigations, collection, presentation and interpretation of data; measures of centrality and dispersion; population distributions, the normal distribution; the sampling distribution of the sample mean; statistical inference - interval estimation for the population mean (large and small samples), choosing the sample size, sampling from a small population, one-tailed and two-tailed testing of hypotheses, testing an hypothesis about the population mean and the difference between population means (large and small samples); introduction to simple linear regression.

Assessment Assignments: 40% - Examination: 60%

Prescribed texts

Waters D Quantitative methods for business 2nd edn, Addison-Wesley, 1997

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