Leader: Mr Bruce Stephens, Dr Tissa Galagedera, Dr Jonathan Dark

Offered

Caulfield First semester 2008 (Day)
Caulfield First semester 2008 (Evening)
Caulfield Second semester 2008 (Day)

Synopsis

Students will learn to use basic statistical techniques and their applications to problems in accounting, finance, management, marketing and business in general. Students should also be able to effectively communicate the results of their analyses. This unit covers descriptive statistics for revealing the information contained in data; probability as a tool for dealing with uncertainty and risk; probability distributions to model business behaviour; estimation and hypothesis testing techniques for decision making; simple tools for forecasting time series; and calculation and interpretation of basic price indices. Excel is used extensively.

Objectives

The learning objectives of this unit are to:

• interpret business data using descriptive statistics techniques, including the use of spreadsheet functions;
• apply simple concepts of probability and probability distributions to problems in business decision-making;
• describe the role of statistical inference and apply inference methods to single population means;
• evaluate relationships between variables for business decision-making, using the concept of correlation and simple linear regression;
• apply time series techniques of indexing, deflating and forecasting to business and financial series and interpret the results.

Assessment

Assignment(s) and/or tests: 50%
Final examination (3 hours): 50%

Contact hours

Two 1-hour lectures, one 1-hour tutorial per week

Prohibitions

BMS11, BUS1100, PMM2020, ETC1000, ETW1102