Exam 1: Overview of Statistics

Statistical challenges include imperfect data, practical constraints, and ethical dilemmas.

Statistics helps surmount language barriers to solve problems in multinational businesses.

Statistics is an essential part of critical thinking because it allows us to transform the empirical evidence from a sample so it will agree with our preferred conclusions.

Which of the following is not a characteristic of an ideal statistician?

Inferential statistics refers to generalizing from a sample to a population, estimating unknown parameters, drawing conclusions, and making decisions.

When a statistician omits data contrary to her findings in a study, she is justified as long as the sample supports her objective.

An example of descriptive statistics would be reporting the percentage of students in your accounting class that attended the review session for the last exam.

Excel has limited use in business because advanced statistical software is widely available.

Established risk factors such as cholesterol and obesity can predict who will get heart disease about 80 percent of the time. Adding a new test called CRP can raise this percentage to 81 percent-a statistically significant difference. But would this improvement be of practical importance to a physician? To a patient? Discuss.

The NASA experiences with the Challenger and Columbia disasters suggest that:

Pitfalls to consider in a statistical test include nonrandom samples, small sample size, and lack of causal links.

Descriptive statistics refers to summarizing data rather than generalizing about the population.